Sometime last year, we had informed you folks about Google rolling out XML sitemaps for Blogger blogs.
Though we couldn’t find any official announcement from Google/Blogger, it looks like this feature is now available on all Blogger blogs including those which use a custom domain name like this one.
Sitemap is an XML document which lists out all the URLs of your site in an XML format so that search engines can easily identify and crawl pages on your website. The location of the sitemap is usually specified in the site’s robots.txt file(which will be read by the Search Engine Crawlers).
If you look at the robots.txt file of any Blogger Blog, you will find that it specifies a new sitemap URL.
As you can see in the above screenshot, this blog’s sitemap is located at
http://www.bloggerplugins.org/sitemap.xml
If you take a look at this URL, you can see that it lists out the URLs of all posts on BP along with their last modified timestamp. This information will help the crawlers in easily identifying any new entries on your blog.
Managing Sitemaps on Google WebMaster Tools
Google can easily find out your sitemap URL by reading your robots.txt file, but in case you want to explicitly specify the Sitemap URL and see the crawl/indexing statistics, you can update the new Sitemap URL in Webmaster tools. To add the new Blogger Sitemap, login at the below URL using your Google account.
If your blog was already added to webmaster tools, then it will be listed on Webmaster tools, if not add it using the “ADD A SITE” button. Once your blog is listed on WebMaster tools, click on the site name so that it takes you to the Site Dashboard.
Now navigate to Crawl > Sitemaps on the left side menu. Now click on the “ADD/TEST SITEMAP” button,give sitemap.xml in the text box and click “Submit Sitemap”
Once it’s submitted, you can see the results on the same page.
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