How To: Create a Valid XML Sitemap for Your Blogger Blog

This is a short tutorial on how to create a valid xml sitemap for your blogger blog. If you are a newbie to Blogging and happen to own a Blog on Blogger.com, you should first know what is a sitemap and how is it useful for your Blog.

What are Sitemaps?

A sitemap is simply a map or a page which stores all the URLs of your site. This sitemap is very useful for Google crawlers and search engines to find new content on your blog. If you post a new article on your blog, that URL gets logged in your sitemap and the next time search engines crawl your site, they will index your new post.

Only when search engines index your posts, they will start appearing in the Google Search results. And when a user enters a keyword related to your blog post in the Google search box, he will see your post and click it to find further information. Thus sitemaps are very essential to search engines.

Search Engines support sitemaps which are in the XML format. Now by default, your Blogger blog contains an Atom feed and displays only a few posts in the sitemap. To make a sitemap XML compatible you have to add the whole site structure of your blog, thereby including URLs of all the posts and pages residing on your domain.

How to Create a Blogger Sitemap?

Here are the Steps with which you can make your Blogger sitemap, XML ready.

Step 1: Visit Sitemap Generator and then enter the full URL of your Blogger blog. Now hit Create Sitemap button.

Screenshot of Sitemap generator creating a sitemap

Please click on image to enlarge

Step 2: Now you should see Sitemap generated. Copy the whole thing, starting from User agent to the sitemap url into your Notepad.

Step 3: Sign into Blogger.com and then click on your Blog. Here navigate to your Settings tab and then click on Search Preferences. Under the Crawler and Indexing section, you will find, Custom robots.txt which will be disabled by default. Click on Edit button in front of it and then enable it. Now a box will popup, here paste everything we had copied in Step 2 and finally hit Save Changes.

Screenshot on how to enable custom robots.txt file in Blogger

That’s it. From now on, your custom robots.txt file will be served to all the search engines which is fully XML compatible making it better for Google to index your webpages.

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Source: labnol.org