While checking out Google's Webmaster Tools, I noticed something rather interesting about sitemaps for Blogger:
So I checked it out for myself, and I'm happy to say that it works! What's more, other search engines can easily find your sitemap too...
So how does it work?
Blogger generates a "robots.txt" file for every blog automatically. This tells search engines which directories they are disallowed from, and includes the location of your sitemap. When your site is crawled by search engines, they find the location of your sitemap from the robots.txt file, and are able to update their databases with the posts they find here.
The robots.txt file for Blogger Buster looks like this:
User-agent: Mediapartners-Google
Disallow:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /search
Sitemap: http://www.bloggerbuster.com/feeds/posts/default?orderby=updated
As you can see from this example, Blogger use the default feed (ordered by the last post update) as the sitemap for your blog.
This helps search engines find your most recent posts. It's quite useful as this means you don't need to fiddle about telling Google and other search engines about your sitemap.
You can take a look at the robots.txt file generated for your own blog by going to http://yourblogname.blogspot.com/robots.txt, substituting "yourblogname" for that of your own blog. If you use a custom domain for your blog, this will be located at http://www.yourblogname.com/robots.txt instead.
I'm happy to know that Blogger now include this sitemap in the robots.txt files for our blogs. It certainly saves us a lot of time trying to submit sitemaps to other search engines!
25 Comments:
.
sooo now its realy automated!!
we don´t need to go to google webmaster tools to create one!
nice
Thanks for all the great tips. As I am still new with all the technical aspects of blogging, I am not sure if I need to create a site map or not. How would I go about creating a site map if I need to?
Thanks in advance.
Hi Amanda, Great information, I took a look at my sitemap for the Political Coffeehouse and took a look at yours also. The sitemap for both sites do not reflect a true map of the sites, should it? And if so, is it possible to insert some code to the Label Cloud or some other area in order to get the whole site mapped?
Have a great day!
I have been wondering if my blogger blogs had sitemaps or not. Thank you for the info. I no longer need to worry about it!
What does the
Disallow: /search
mean? How do you control this? I'd like my individual pages to come up in Google searches. Does this have anything to do with this?
so we dont need to submit a sitemap right? thank you for the confirmation that Blogspot don't need a sitemap... I was still confuse about it and now I found the fact that blogspot doesnt need it
Dear Amanda
Can you explain why when I see in my webmaster tools, there are still "add" below the sitemap. and when I click my url then I see in index status, there are "You have not submit any sitemaps".
When I try to submitusing atom.xml such as below
http://the-success.blogspot.com/aatom.xml Then google said ERROR. What should I do?
Thanks you
Thanks for all the great tips.
THANKS FOR THE TIPS... REALLY NICE TIPS AND FANTASTIC BLOG...
Amanda,
I've the same question as The Aries. I think we both would appreciate your expertise on this.
I'm seeing errors too.
Rgds
thank you for the heads up I have been trying to create on for days now and could not find anything on it thanks
Hi Amanda,
Just like My Vision, I would also like to edit my robots.txt so that individual pages can be searched too. I know how to edit the robots.txt but the problem is how do I upload it back to blogger? Thanks a lot.
The info is very useful.
www.mobmani.blogspot.com
good this is good info
Great info. I really like your blog .....
I just know that blogger has a sitemap and work automatically
OK....so then theres no need to add the sitemap to Google Webtools?
I have added it. But http://professionallab.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default and atom.xml is giving error. Don't understand what to do with them.
I knew this but still the pots is very informative
I have a very similar problem wit http://pjamal.com but I think instead of atom.xml, I added the following - http://www.pjamal.com/feeds/posts/default?orderby=updated This seems to be working for me!
Glad they improve this. Good thing about blogger is the page loading time is very fast.
This post is very informative.
Blogger is quite the service now and with google in charge of the service it has become an SEO dream. Blog posts on blogger are now indexed within seconds if not as soon as they are published. So you can instantly reap search engine benefits
Post a Comment