Optimizing Your Blogger Blog with an XML Sitemap

Optimizing Your Blogger Blog with an XML Sitemap

An effective way to enhance Google's ability to crawl your Blogger blog is by incorporating an XML sitemap. Google actively encourages the use of XML Sitemaps as they facilitate swift and accurate indexing. Search engines such as Google, Bing, and others leverage XML Sitemaps to locate and index blog posts and pages that might otherwise be overlooked during regular crawling. Consequently, an XML sitemap ensures proper indexing of your blog by Google.

Steps to Generate and Add an XML Sitemap

1. Generate an XML Sitemap

  • Log in to an XML Sitemap Generator.

  • Enter your blog URL (website address).

  • Click Generate Sitemap to create the XML file.

2. Adding Sitemap to Blogger

  • Copy the entire generated XML sitemap.

  • Visit Blogger.com and open your blog dashboard.

  • Navigate to Settings and locate Crawlers and Indexing.

  • Enable Custom robots.txt.

  • Paste the XML sitemap into the custom robots.txt file.

  • Modify Disallow:/Search to Disallow:/None to allow Google to crawl Labels (Categories) whose URLs contain "search". Without this change, Google's crawler won’t be permitted to index these URLs.

  • Save changes to update your blog settings.

3. Verifying Your Custom Robots.txt File

To confirm that your robots.txt is correctly configured, follow these steps:

  • Open a web browser and type your blog’s URL followed by /robots.txt.

  • Example: http://www.yourblogurl.blogspot.com/robots.txt.

  • This will display the code present in your robots.txt file, ensuring proper implementation.

By following these steps, you can enhance your Blogger blog's SEO and ensure that Google's search bots effectively crawl and index all of your blog content.

Next Post Previous Post