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| Source: 1000logos.net |
When I started blogging on blogger blogspot.com, Google crawler excluded most of my blog posts; more than 50% of my posts wouldn’t be indexed. You know, Google crawler crawling and indexing your blog and it’s posts is what can make your blog posts appear on search engines. So getting your posts crawled and indexed is the first SEO strategy. If Google crawler misses your new blog post at the time you are promoting the post on social media, Google may not index it again, if you don’t do something to facilitate the indexing. So, I started submitting my posts URL one by one to Google sitemap, yet I wasn’t getting the needed results. And Google on 14th of October, 2020 disabled manual one-by-one submission of post, page URL for indexing. I decided to make more research, I finally learned the best way to do it. That’s what I’m going to teach you right now!
XML SITEMAP
The best way to make Google better crawl on your blogger blog is to add XML sitemap to your blog. Google encourages using XML Sitemap, others for quick and optimal crawling. Google, Bing, and other search engines use XML Sitemap to discover and crawl some pages and posts on your site that their search bots may have missed during regular crawling. Therefore, XML sitemap helps Google crawler to properly index your blog site.
XML sitemap generator divides all your blog posts in blogger blog into groups — 500 posts in each group — and generates XML feed for each group. This will make search engines to discover every post on your blog because it is now in one XML sitemap with about 500 other posts. You may ask, “what if my blog posts are not up to 500 or can’t be divided into equal 500s?” It doesn’t matter the number of posts on your site so long as there are reasonable number of posts. 500 post in one group is just a class interval, which means more than 500 posts can’t be in one group, and you can’t have another group unless the first group is up to 500.
This XML sitemap works for both blogger hosted and self hosted blogs. But we are going to focus on how to implement it on blogger blogspot blogs.
Generate and Add XML Sitemap To Your Blogger Blog
1. Log in to Sitemap Generator
2. Enter your blog URL (your blog site address)
3. Click on Generate Sitemap to generate the XML file for your sitemap
4. Copy the whole text
5. Open your blog on Blogger.com, click on Settings at the dashboard. Look for Enable Custom robots.txt option under Crawlers and Indexing, and select it.
6. Paste the XML sitemap in the custom robots.txt. Change Disallow:/Search to Disallow:/None as you can see in the picture below. This will let Google crawler crawl all the pages in your blog including Labels (Categories), which have "search" in the URLs. If, not the Google crawler will be blocked/ disallowed from crawling and indexing "search" pages URLs.
7. Save changes.
Now, you have exposed your enter blog structure to Google crawler and other search engines. They will automatically discover your XML sitemap file through the robots.txt file for better crawling and indexing.
Check Your Custom Robots.txt File
To check your robots.txt, type your sites URL on web browser and add "/robots.txt".
Example: http://www.yourblogurl.blogspot.com/robots.txt
This will display the code in your custom robots.txt file
Read also: How to Use IndexNow Let Bing, Yandex Crwal and Index Your Content Instantly
- Log in to search.google.com/search-console/sitemaps?
- Click on Enter sitemap URL, enter your sitemap URL. Example: https://yoursiteurl.blogspot.com/atom.xml?redirect=false&start=index-1&max-results=500
- Submit
Thank you.. but, am I going to copy every text there including the date of creation and the website of the blog that create it?
ReplyDeleteCopy from "User-agent" that will be enough. Even if you copy everything including date and site where the XML was generated, it will still work - no difference.
DeleteHello, but what if the sitemap is much more than the characters allowed? How do I make it shorter?
ReplyDeleteReading Witches, I don`t understand what you mean by sitemap been more than characters allowed. But then, when you generate your site XML sitemap, you copy everything into your Blogger Custom robots.txt. But for Google Search Console Sitemap, you only need to enter your site URL sitemap which will look like: https://yoursiteurl.blogspot.com/atom.xml?redirect=false&start=index-1&max-results=500
DeleteOne sitemap covers up 500 pages. If you have more than 500 pages but less than 1,000 page, you will have to enter 2 different sitemap URLs one by one.
you can refer to the screenshots in this article for proper guide. Just follow the steps.
I hope this solves things for you?
Oh okay, thank you I generated the sitemap. Sorry, I was just using a different sitemap creator than the one you provided and it was giving me very long sitemaps. So how do I generate another sitemap for the rest of my pages?
DeleteReading Witches, you generate XML sitemap for your entire site once. The number of your site sitemap URL will be according to the number of multiple of 500 pages. If your pages are less than 500 the sitemap URL will be 1 and that is what you will enter in your Google Search Console sitemap. But if you have 501-1000 it will be 2 and so on. you have to enter the sitemap URLs one by one. Anytime your pages exceed the current multiple of 500, you have to generate new sitemap that will cover them.
DeleteHello,
ReplyDeleteYes, I understand. But when I opened my sitemap, I found that some of my oldest posts are missing (about 30 pages). Is there a way to generate a sitemap for what's missing?
Your sitemap tool doesn't work
ReplyDeleteBoss the theme I'm using is showing auto ads might not work well with the current theme, please is the any solution?
ReplyDeleteMaybe you are using free theme, although some premium themes are not responsive. The solution will be to change the theme. Adjustment can be done to the theme source code only if you have coding knowledge.
DeleteMy advice is to change the theme with a responsive premium theme.
Please can XML sitemap be created with custom domain or it must be created with blogspot
ReplyDeleteYou can generate xml sitemap for both free blogspot domain and custom domain.
Deletethe sitemap is not working anymore ... why/
ReplyDeleteI really enjoyed reading your blog post about generating and adding an XML sitemap to your blog. I thought it was really helpful that you included the steps to generate and add the XML sitemap. I also thought it was helpful that you included the way to make Google better crawl on your blog. I've always wondered how to get Google to crawl my blog without getting my blog flagged as spam. Thank you for the helpful blog post!
ReplyDeletethanks buddy
ReplyDelete