Adding a sitemap to Google’s Webmaster tools is one of the first tips you will be told to do when you first manage a web site or blog. It is an easy process to do, and you can get many benefits from it, such as monitoring how Google is indexing your pages, the external and internal links it finds, and any problems Google may find with indexing your site.
For Blogger users, the sitemap to your blog may not be easy to find. Blogger does have a built-in tool that can help you add your sitemap, but if other services can use a sitemap, you may want to know where the sitemap is located. The good news, is that it is easy to find.
Blogger Tells You Your Sitemap Name
When I was using Blogger I had to look up in the Blogger help and forums on where I could find a sitemap. I eventually found out that the atom feed produced by Blogger can be used as a sitemap. The trouble was trying to remember the feed URL each time I needed to use the sitemap.
For many web sites, the robots.txt file may contain the location of a sitemap for their site. Usually, a webmaster would need to create the entry into the robots.txt file for it to be included. For Blogger users, this is done automatically for you.
To find the location of your sitemap, use the following steps:
- Open up your web browser, and type in your Blogger blog’s URL.
- At the end of the URL add robots.txt.
For example, if the URL of your blog is http://myblog.blogspot.com, then enter http://myblog.blogspot.com/robots.txt
- Some text should now be displayed in your browser. Look for a line that starts with Sitemap:. The URL after that label is the location of your sitemap.
Using the example above, the line would look like:
Sitemap: http://myblog.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?orderby=updated
- Back in Google’s Webmaster Tools, the domain name part of the URL would already be included, so you would just need to specify the feeds/posts/default?orderby=updated portion of the sitemap URL. If other sites are able to accept a sitemap, then you may need to include the entire URL
If in the future you are having problems with your sitemap, you can always pull up the robots.txt file to make sure your sitemap file hasn’t changed.
