The Sitemap for Bloggers 2020
A Sitemap is in simple terms a list of accessible pages on your website. Sitemaps facilitate the crawling of your website by search engines like Yahoo, Bing, and Google for a better index. The creation of a sitemap for blogger is valuable in that, each time you create and publish a new post, search engines will easily crawl and index each of your posts.
As a professional blogger, you need to ensure that your 2020 sitemap for bloggers is present and operational. We will take you through the steps involved in the creation of a sitemap for blogger.
By default, all blogs possess a sitemap through an issue pops up due to the limited potential of this default sitemap: it shows only recent blog posts. The ideal sitemap on the other hand is expected to contain the list of all the pages that comprise your blog such that the complete structure of your site is made known to search engines. Let’s see take a look at how you can create a good sitemap for your blog.
How to create a sitemap for bloggers?
By creating a blogger sitemap, a complete XML can be generated for your blog aimed at increasing the visibility of both old and recent blog posts in search engines. This creation is valid for both basic blogger blogs that bear a blog.com address and self-hosted blogger blogs that rather use a custom domain name like domain.com. To expose the entire structure of your website to search engines, here is what you ought to do.
- Reach for and open the sitemap generator then type in your complete bloggers’ blog address.
- Tap on the button “Generate Sitemap” and the tool will automatically generate the XML file with your sitemap. All you need do now is copy the entire text provided to your keyboard.
- From there, navigate to the settings of your blogger.com dashboard and choose the option “Search Preferences”. Further, select the Crawling and Index section and enable the custom option “robots.txt”. Paste the XML of the sitemap here then, save your changes.
Once the above steps are executed, search engines like Google and Bing will automatically find the XML files of your sitemap through the robots.txt file.
For effective operation, the XML sitemap generator works internally by counting all blog posts found on your blogger blog. The posts are then slipping in packs of 500 posts each and multiple XML feeds are then generated for each pack. From these feeds, each post on your bloggers’ blog will be part of the XML sitemaps, and as such search engines will be able to locate them all.
Note however that if you happen to divert from Blogger to WordPress, it can still be beneficial to submit XML sitemaps of old blog posts. This will once more facilitate the location of all your new WordPress blog posts and pages.
What are the basic requirements for an XML Sitemap?
For optimal functioning of your XML sitemap, your bloggers’ blog needs to meet the following standards. It should be:
- BUTF-8 encoded.
- Referenced in robots.txt.
- Compressed in .gz format.
- Composed only of canonical URLs with a 200 status code.
- Comprise a minimum of 200K URLs per sitemap and each index sitemap should have at least 50k sitemaps.
PS: though all pages should be included, pages like those on your privacy policy or about us page do not need to be frequently crawled are unimportant and do not bring a plus when working on SEO.