Further to my other post on why you need a sitemap, and how to add one to a WordPress blog, I have now set one up for a Blogger blog.
The steps are very simple, and will require a minor edit of your template. If you’ve never done it, it’s not as frightening as it sounds! Just make sure you backup your template first as described below.
- Visit Google Webmaster Tools and sign up to a free account. If you have a Gmail email address, you can sign in with that. If you haven’t got Gmail & would like it, mail me & I’ll send you an invite.
- Once signed into Webmaster tools, choose to add a website & submit your blog URL. Google will find it & invite you to verify your site.
- Click on verify, and choose to validate by uploading a Meta tag. (You cannot use the other method with Blogger) Copy & paste this Meta Tag to Notepad or similar.
- In a new window/tab visit your Blogger Dashboard, and click on ‘Template’, then ‘Edit HTML’.
- BEFORE doing anything else, choose ‘Download Full Template’ and save it to your hard-drive. If anything goes wrong (It won’t), you can simply upload this saved template to put your blog back the way it was before you started.
- Look at the HTML in the edit window. Approximately 6 lines down you will see the ‘HEAD’ tag (shown in red below). Copy the Meta Tag (shown in pink) from Notepad and paste it directly next to the ‘HEAD’ tag as shown. Save the changes. View your blog, there should be no visible difference.
- Switch back to Google Webmaster Tools, click the button for Google to check your verification - this should take a few seconds and then will confirm it is verified, or if not, whether it’s your fault or Google’s. Sometimes Google doesn’t work first time - try again or leave a few hours, it will get done.
- Now you have to tell Google the location of the Sitemap. First choose ‘General Web Sitemap’ for the type. The location for Blogger blogs is the same as your Atom news feed, and will be in the format of : http://YOURBLOGNAME.blogspot.com/atom.xml
- Click submit & you’re finished.
Easy really? Google will index your site over the next few days, and this will ensure that your post titles are searchable by Google that much faster than without. Questions, corrections or cries for help? My email address is on the About page.
Here’s the template view for step 6.
34 users commented in " Add A Sitemap To Your Blogger Blog "
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A 9 step guide to adding a sitemap to your Blogger blog. Quick & easy to do, a sitemap will ensure that your posts are indexed quickly & will show up in Google searches. It will only take 10 minutes, so why not?…
Will you please send me an invite for gmail. Thank you Joe
On it’s way Joe
Wow! Great instructions - I just followed along and it worked perfectly!
Thanks Kai, glad to hear it.
Hi, i allready have a google webmaster account and have uploaded a sitemap to it, i am new to blogging and not sure if i am getting the hang of it or not, am i supposed to create a blog with a site map in it, then send google of to index the blog i have created? is this not just the same as adding a sitemap to google webmater tools??
Kathryn,
You do not need a blog to make use of a sitemap. If it’s for your art site (lovely pictures by the way) then all you need to do is keep your sitemap up to date - if you re-vamp your site, make sure you regenerate the sitemap as well.
As Google has your URL, it will then come back & find the new sitemap.
Of course, you can start a blog to write about your activities & use it to drive traffic to your art site-there’s some articles on Blog-Op about how to do this, or feel free to mail me & I’ll explain further.
Hi Cris just sent you an email. regards
Kathryn
Hi Kathryn, I’ve replied to your mail
Hi Chris
Should i have a site map for each subdirectory in my site such as my ecommerce site is in http://www.mazoo.co.uk/art/
and now i have set up a blog do i add another site map for subdomain http://www.mazoo.co.uk/blog
??
because at the moment i only have my domain http://www.mazoo.co.uk added to webmaster tools with the site map added there? hope you can understand the question if not email me and i forward a image of my tools section and explain further.
Kathryn
I think it will be best to have one in the main root directory for the art site, and one generated by the WP pluging within the /blog directory. The blog one will be updated after every post, and will ping Google Blogsearch as well. I shouldn’t imagine your art site gets updated that often relatively speaking, so it’s not so important.
You could also consider buying another domain for your blog which only points to that directory: FYI my Thermal blog is actually a sub-directory of Blog-Op, on the server, but the domain only points to that sub-directory.
That was probably an awful answer-you know where my mail is!
I have done all the steps but the last one long back. will it make a difference?
Hi Ramanathan,
Do you mean you haven’t told Google the location of your sitemap?
It will find it in time, but it’s best to submit & make sure.
This is a very simple thing to do and it helps alot. My blog gets indexed by google and yahoo withing hours. You can also use the same sitemap and submit to yahoo.
Good point, not to forget Yahoo.
Thanks
Chris, thanks a ton. I added sitemap now. I never knew that the sitemap has “http://YOURBLOGNAME.blogspot.com/atom.xml” this format.
Fantastic. You are doing a great job.
Chris, How to add sitemap to yahoo? It asks to upload a html file to verify the site. Uploading files to blogger is not possible right?
What is the solution?
You are correct Ramanathan, there appears no way to do it.
However, you may still submit your site to Yahoo & it will be indexed just the same. You only need to authenticate in order to read extra stats, the likes of which Google Webmaster tools can tell you.
Don’t forget to submit to DMOZ as well. They provide data to all the search engines including Google Yahoo and MSN.
Thanks for coming back
Nice Post.
That was well said. Always appreciate your indepth views. Keep up the great work!
John
[...] On Blogger? Read my post on Blogger Sitemaps. [...]
great instructions…thanks!
No problem Katherine
Thanks for this, but I am guessing it’s not for wordpress.com blogs such as mine?
http://goldcoaster.wordpress.com
Hi Goldcoaster: I’ve not really looked into WP.com, I really should.
If you can’t use plugins, try the Blogger route and setup a Webmaster account and submit your atom feed url as the sitemap as above-if it works, let me know please.
[...] Blogger Users [...]
Thank you for the article on submitting a sitemap for a Blogger blog at Google Webmasters Central. The XML feed works perfectly as a sitemap alternative.
Excellent, glad it helped.
Great article! I was long time trying to find out how to create a site map for mi Blog in Blogger, and I didn’t know that the ATOM Feed worked fine. Very good tips. Thanks a lot!
Cheers Marco
Thank you so much for the information. I added this a few days ago and now I already have 4 pages in google. Thank again.
Hi,this article is helpful and neccesary for blog beginers ,keep doing the good job. Thank you.
aa, so you basically submit your atom feed url, to google sitemaps after adding your blog to google sitemaps.
Those that already submitted a .xml sitemap file for their website will find it 10 times easier.
By default, atom.xml only contains 25 posts. If you want you increase the number of posts in your atom.xml, change your URL to:
atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1&max-results=100
This will give you 100 posts. I think blogger has a limit on the number of posts in your atom.xml file, but I am not sure what it is.
If you have more than 100 posts, simply add another URL to get the next batch:
atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=101&max-results=200
I hope you get the idea.
Thanks so much for your article, I have been trying for ages to sort out a Sitemap for my Blogger site and all I needed to know was that the Sitemap was just my blogger URL, with atom.xml on the end.
Once again, thanks so much.
http://www.clearlearning.co.uk
http://www.clearlearning.blogspot.com
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