Sitemaps in Blogger Sites
In today's digital world, sitemaps are playing a very vital role in making sure that you are viewed at the best by search engines. They seem to be like giving a map to your site to be crawled and indexed efficiently by any Search Engine like Google. Unless you have a good sitemap in place, the pages of your site might never get seen, meaning your possibilities of ranking on SERPs will decline dramatically.
This article will take a look at the importance of sitemaps, especially as they apply to the use of sitemaps on the Blogger website, and guide you through implementing advanced sitemaps to really take your website to the next level for ranking.
Why Sitemaps Are Important To Your Blogger Site
Sitemap is essential to boost the SEO performance of your Blogger site. It ensures all your pages are crawled and indexed by search engines. And this is why sitemaps are important:
- Improved Crawling Effectiveness: It lets the search engines know the pages worth crawling and indexing.
- Sitemap is updated frequently: Any time you add new content, the sitemap contains these updates, making the search engines revisit your website frequently to index new pages.
- Structured Information: Sitemaps present structured information, metadata, and page hierarchy, aiding search engines in their concept of how pages relate to each other.
- Scalable for Large Sites: If your Blogger website contains hundreds of posts or thousands of pages, then a sitemap ensures that even the deeper pages get noticed.
Types of Sitemaps for Blogger Sites
There are two primary types of sitemaps that every Blogger ought to know about:
1. XML Sitemaps
An XML sitemap is the most commonly used type and is also the one preferred by the search engines. In this file, it outlines all the URLs on your site and includes metadata such as when a page was last updated.
2. HTML Sitemaps
While HTML sitemaps are mainly aimed toward the function of users, they also help in SEO. They provide some kind of navigation guide where it becomes relatively easy for the users to find pages, which indirectly means improvement in user experience and subsequently raises the SEO index.
For a Blogger site, an XML sitemap is the most important tool, but an HTML sitemap is not something that should be taken lightly; it's valuable in terms of its improvement in internal linking and navigation.
How to Get Advanced Sitemaps for Blogger
Step 1: Make an XML Sitemap
Blogger automatically makes a simple sitemap for you, but advanced sitemaps give you more control and better results.
Here's how to access and submit your Blogger XML sitemap:
- Access Your Blogger Sitemap
- Blogger automatically creates a sitemap located at
yourblog.blogspot.com/sitemap.xml.
- Blogger automatically creates a sitemap located at
- In that default sitemap, it shows only your latest published posts, and it only contains 500 URLs. The more massive sites need more of these sitemaps to be manually created.
- Custom Sitemap To get all the URLs: You can create an absolutely complete sitemap of your site with the help of tools like Sitemap Generator or XML-sitemaps.com.
- Export the XML file produced and upload it to a hosting service or link directly if it is hosted online.
- Submit Your Sitemap to Google Search Console
After getting the sitemap URL, add it into Google Search Console:
- access Google Search Console.
- At the "Sitemaps" tab, add your sitemap URL and click Submit.
- This would ensure that Google crawls your site many times and indexes all your content in a quite efficient manner.
**Step 2: Set Up an HTML Sitemap
An HTML sitemap isn't necessary, but it can be included to provide additional SEO benefits while improving the user experience. Here's how to set one up:
- How to Create an HTML Sitemap Page In Blogger, create a new static page and name it "Sitemap." Manually list the pages or posts you'd like to include in a straightforward list format, linking each one.
- Internal Linking
Link this HTML sitemap from your site's footer or main menu, so visitors will find and access your content with ease. Besides improving the user experience, this will also get Google to follow those links, which will help with deeper site indexing.
**Step 3: Sitemap Automatic Updates
Updating the sitemap manually is a big pain in the tush, especially if you post frequently. To maintain the updated sitemap on your blog:
Auto Your XML Sitemap
Use the tool or plugins which automatically update your XML sitemap whenever you publish new content. You now ensure that the search engine knows about the new pages when you make them live.
Use Blogger's RSS Feed as Alternative Sitemap
Blogger gives the nice functionality that your blog's RSS feed can be used as a sitemap. You can submit the following URL to Google Search Console:
yourblog.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rssThis feed will automatically be updated every time you post new content in the manner of a classic sitemap.
Monitoring of Sitemap Performance
After submitting your sitemap, track how it performs as follows:
Google Search Console
Check the "Sitemaps" section and see the number of URLs submitted vs the number indexed. If these numbers are significantly different, this means there's a crawling issue that you need to investigate.
Crawl Errors
One way to identify crawl errors is by using Google Search Console. Broken links, un-reachable pages, or redirect loops may interfere with how search engines crawl your site. 3. Track Indexed Pages
Check the indexed pages by using the \"site:yourdomain.com\" search query within Google often. Then, compare with the URLs shown in the submitted sitemap to see if they're identical.
BEST PRACTICES FOR OPTIMIZING YOUR BLOGGER SITEMAP
To help your sitemap work as intended, thereby giving you the best SEO results, observe the following best practices:
Keep URLs Short and Descriptive Keep your URLs clean, informative, and free from unnecessary characters. This will make it easier for search engines to analyze what's on your page.
Limit the Number of URLs in a Sitemap Although you can include up to 50,000 URLs in an XML sitemap, it is still best to have around 500-1000 URLs for a single file to make performance better.
Update Your Sitemap Periodically Ensure that your sitemap includes your newest content. Automated tools can provide assistance in this regard.
Canonical URLs If the content is redundant, then use canonical tags to identify your preferred version of a page for the search engines. In this way, there won't be any confusion about which page you'd prefer and the indexing of which pages will be exclusive to your preferred ones.
For Blogger-specific configurations in your robots.txt file, you can use the following special setups. These are designed to help you manage indexing and crawling more effectively for a Blogger site:
Basic Blogger Setup:
User-agent: * Disallow: /search Allow: / Sitemap: https://yourbloggersiteurl.blogspot.com/sitemap.xmlAllow All Content and Sitemap:
User-agent: * Disallow: Sitemap: https://yourbloggersiteurl.blogspot.com/sitemap.xmlDisallow Search Pages and Hidden Pages:
User-agent: * Disallow: /search Disallow: /p/private-page.html Allow: / Sitemap: https://yourbloggersiteurl.blogspot.com/sitemap.xmlAllow Only Important Pages and Block Specific Directories:
User-agent: * Disallow: /search Disallow: /pages/hidden/ Allow: /p/ Sitemap: https://yourbloggersiteurl.blogspot.com/sitemap.xmlPrevent Indexing of Comments and Specific Page Types:
User-agent: * Disallow: /search Disallow: /comments/ Disallow: /tag/ Allow: / Sitemap: https://yourbloggersiteurl.blogspot.com/sitemap.xmlAllow Googlebot and Block All Other Bots:
User-agent: Googlebot Disallow: User-agent: * Disallow: / Sitemap: https://yourbloggersiteurl.blogspot.com/sitemap.xmlCustom Setup to Handle Tags and Archive Pages:
User-agent: * Disallow: /search Disallow: /tags/ Disallow: /archive/ Allow: / Sitemap: https://yourbloggersiteurl.blogspot.com/sitemap.xmlSpecial Rules for Specific Bots:
User-agent: Googlebot Disallow: /search Allow: / User-agent: Bingbot Disallow: /search Disallow: /p/ Allow: / User-agent: * Disallow: / Sitemap: https://yourbloggersiteurl.blogspot.com/sitemap.xml
Replace https://yourbloggersiteurl.blogspot.com/sitemap.xml with your actual sitemap URL, and adjust the Disallow and Allow rules based on your specific needs. These configurations help manage how search engines and bots interact with different parts of your Blogger site.
Conclusion
Sitemaps are the best tool that enhances the visibility and also the overall performance of SEO for a Blogger site. Both XML and HTML sitemaps should be updated, so that all content pertaining to the site can get indexed by search engines with which a silky-smooth user experience will be expected. Optimization and updating of the sitemaps will be a regular activity that will make you rank more, increase the traffic to it, and gain greater success in your website.