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How To Submit Your Blogger Sitemap To Google

One of the most important forms of traffic you can have coming in to your site is organic traffic. By organic traffic, I'm referring to visitors who find your site without having to do any incremental promotion on your own, a key one being via search engines like Google or Bing.

Google Search Console, previously known as Google Webmaster Tools, is a free web service by Google that allows webmasters to check indexing status and optimize visibility of their websites. As with Bing, once you have verified ownership of your blog, you will be allowed to submit a sitemap of your blog. As we'll explain, submitting a sitemap is very important to improve the visibility of your blog.

What is a sitemap?

A sitemap is a file listing the web pages of your site which provides Google and other search engines information about the organization of your site content. Search engine web crawlers like Googlebot and Bingbot use this file to crawl your site more intelligently.

Your sitemap can also provide valuable metadata associated with the pages you list in that sitemap. What is metadata? Metadata is information about a webpage, such as when the page was last updated, how often the page is changed, and the importance of the page relative to other URLs in the site.

Apart from information about the webpages and structure of your site, you can also use a sitemap to provide Google with metadata about specific file types including video and images. Some examples include:
  • A sitemap for a video entry can specify it's running time, category, and rating.
  • A sitemap image entry can include the image subject matter and license.

Do you need to submit a sitemap?

Technically, if your site’s pages are properly linked, Google's web crawlers can discover most of your site. Even so, a sitemap can improve the crawling of your site, particularly if:
Your site is really large. It’s more likely Google's web crawlers might overlook crawling some of your new or recently updated pages.
Your site has a large archive of pages that are isolated or well not linked to each other.  If the pages in your site do not reference each other, you can list them in a sitemap to ensure that Google does not overlook some of your pages.

Your site is new and has few external links to it. Web crawlers crawl the web by following links from one page to another. As a result, Google might not discover your pages if no other sites link to them.

Submit your site to Google Webmaster

Now that you know more about sitemaps and why it's important to submit them, here's how to actually submit your Blogger site's sitemap to Google in 6 easy steps which will take less than 10 minutes. I've assumed that you've already verified ownership of the site you're submitting the sitemap for.

1. Sign in to Google Search Console (Google Webmaster Tools)
2. Select the site you wish to submit the sitemap for
3. Click on "Sitemaps" which can be found somewhere at the bottom of the Dashboard page:



4. Click on "Add/Test Sitemap"


5. Add the following snippet of code in the pop-up box that appears:

atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1&max-results=500


6. Click on "Submit" and then click on "Refresh the page"

That's it! You have successfully submitted your Blogger site's sitemap to the Google search console. Usually within a day or so, Google's web crawlers will crawl through your site and index your pages.

Comments

One thing to note is that the code that you inserted is sufficient if you have 500 or less blog posts. However, should you have more than 500 blog posts, you can change the "max results" in the code to 1000, for example. 

Using a sitemap also doesn't guarantee that all the items in your sitemap will be crawled and indexed, as Google relies on complex algorithms to crawl websites. However, in most cases, your site will benefit from having a sitemap, and you'll never be penalized for having a sitemap.

We hope you've found this post useful. If you have any questions, just drop us a note and we'll be happy to help! Also, check out our Blogger Resources page for more useful guides and templates related to the Blogger/Blogspot platform and blogging in general.
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