Better Google Sitemap for Blogger Blogs

The combination of Blogger and Google Sitemaps will allow for your Blogger blog to get indexed by the Google spider with the greatest of ease. But did you know that the Blogger code for the default sitemap that you submit to Google Webmasters Tools only allows for the first 26 pages of your blog to get indexed by the Google spider?

Yes, that’s true …

If you are using the default code for your sitemap in Google Webmaster Tools, then your site is missing out for each and every page over the 26 page limit. That means if you happen to have 150 pages on your Blogger blog, you are missing out on the opportunity to allow the Google spider to crawl 124 additional Blogger pages!

I hope you are willing to change this …

Here is what you need to do:

The default sitemap code looks like this (see red + bold text below):

http://YOUR_BLOG_NAME_HERE.blogspot.com/atom.xml?orderby=updated

http://YOUR_BLOG_NAME_HERE.blogspot.com/rss.xml?orderby=updated

There is nothing wrong with the code above - as long as you have less than 27 blog post. Without a doubt you will exceed that maximum limit at some point in your blogging career.

So what can be done? I have found the code below a very good and useful alternative to the default Blogger sitemap code. The new code will break the sitemap down into multiples of 100, so for every 100 pages on your blog you need to tweak the sitemap code a little bit.

The new and improved sitemap code (the Google spider will crawl the first 100 blog posts/pages):

atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1&max-results=100

So in the new sitemap code above, we start with the very first blog post (start-index=1) & now allow the Google spider to crawl to page 100 (max-results=100).

If you already have more than 100 blog pages, you need to submit additional sitemaps for the same blog to the Google Webmaster Tools website. As an example: If you have a Blogger blog that has over 400 posts/pages you will need 4 sitemaps. The codes fort hese 4 sitemaps look like this:

1) atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1&max-results=100

2) atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=100&max-results=100

3) atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=200&max-results=100

4) atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=300&max-results=100

Notice how each new sitemap begins with a higher start-index (by 100 blog posts). With these you are covered for the first 400 blog post of your Blogger blog.

The steps need not be in 100s, you can change that number to anything you like (between 50 and 150 is recommended).

Below is a screenshot of my sitemaps for one of my blogs that has almost 300 pages:

NOTE:

When you submit sitemaps for a Blogger blog to Google Webmaster Tools, Google WILL NOT crawl your Blogger Labels, (that is the reason why not every page is being crawled in the screenshot above).

This new sitemap code has greatly improved how Google crawls my blog. I went from having only the first 26 pages of my blog crawled to now having upward of 180 pages crawled by the Google spider.

Since I have internal links hard coded into my template on every blog page it is important for me to allow Google to crawl as many pages as possible, as often as possible. I also have widgets that have text that changes often, and that text is picked up by the Google spider as well, which allows my blog to show a massive amount of relevant keywords.

Good luck!

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