Using A Robust Sitemap, With Your Blog

For a Blogger blog, proper indexing by the search engines is critical to the success of the blog, in getting readers.

Some blog owners are disappointed to find that their blog has no page rank, and no visibility in the search engine results - and little to no chances for getting readers.

Not all blog owners understand details about the custom domain migration process, any issues related to renaming the blog, or simply how to get a blog properly indexed.

One of the most useful tools, that you as a blog owner can use, is the sitemap.

With a Blogger blog, that is typically a collection of posts indexed by date and maybe by topic, the sitemap, properly presented to the search engines, helps the search engines index all of the posts methodically.

Submit a Sitemap to tell Google about pages on your site we might not otherwise discover.

That's the simple advice, from Google, which you should see.

When I created this blog, and submitted my first sitemap, Google setup a default.

http://bloggerstatusforreal.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?orderby=updated

Had you looked at the "robots.txt" file, when this blog was published as "bloggerstatusforreal.blogspot.com", that's what you would have seen.

Having later published this blog as "blogging.nitecruzr.net", Google setup a new default sitemap.

http://blogging.nitecruzr.net/feeds/posts/default?orderby=updated

You may look at my current "robots.txt" file, and that's what you will see.

The default sitemap indexes the most recent 26 posts. For most blogs, especially new ones, you will seldom publish more than that number between each indexing pass by the search engines - and a 26 posts submission is generally sufficient.

For a blog that's been published for a while, and has more than 26 posts, you will need a more robust sitemap than the default. When you change the URL of the blog, or when you use Jump Break on main page posts, you need a sitemap complement that indexes each individual post, one by one.

Note that any sitemap will be much more useful, with the blog publishing a "Full" feed.

In the example of this blog, which now has over 1,500 posts, I would add 4 sitemaps (each sitemap to submit a maximum of 500 posts)

1. http://blogging.nitecruzr.net/atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1&max-results=500
2. http://blogging.nitecruzr.net/atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=501&max-results=500
3. http://blogging.nitecruzr.net/atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1001&max-results=500
4. http://blogging.nitecruzr.net/atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1501&max-results=500

Having added the right complement of sitemaps, you watch the display in the Sitemaps wizard:

Submitted URLs
1,539
1,535 URLs in web index

Having submitted those sitemaps last week, 1,535 out of 1,539 posts, allowing for some search engine indexing latency, is about right.

Your blog, having a different number of posts, may use a different complement of sitemaps - but you can use a similar strategy, in determining the number to use. And however you look at it, adding a new sitemap segment for every 500 posts beats manually updating the sitemap for every new post.

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