How to use Blogger Full XML Sitemap

Blogger default sitemap is updated and replaced with a full XML sitemap which removes all the problems with the default Blogger sitemap.

One of world’s most used Blogging platform Blogger, is being updated by Google step by step. Despite its several shortcomings, Blogger is very widely used. One of its problems was to add proper sitemaps to Blogger and, Google has updated and fixed this.

Each time a blog is created in Blogger, it generates a default sitemap for it and adds it to the default robots.txt. It can be submitted to the Google webmaster, pinged to search engines and automatically added to the default sitemap.

Recently Google has updated it and now the default sitemap for Blogger blog is;

http://yourdomain.blogspot.com/sitemap.xml

Or, for a top level custom domain for Blogger blog.

http://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml

Previously it was the sitemap was like this;

http://yourdomain.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?orderby=UPDATED

Or, for a top level custom domain for Blogger blog.

http://www.yourdomain.com/feeds/posts/default?orderby=UPDATED

Here; replace http://yourdomain.blogspot.com or http://www.yourdomain.com with you Blogger blog’s URL.

The problems with the previous default sitemap were;

1. It was not a proper XML sitemap.
2. The biggest problem was that; only the latest 26 posts were indexed by this sitemap.
3. This required users to add custom generated Blogger sitemaps to the custom robots.txt.

The new Blogger XML sitemap do not have these problems. If you use the (new) default one the you do not require to custom sitemaps to you blog’s custom robots.txt.

Here are few know issues with new Blogger XML Sitemap and tips to fully utilize this update for your blog.

1. For Blogger blogs with custom domain, the sitemap used to through an error. But currently it is working fine. If you are facing any problem then, add custom generated generated sitemaps and switch to Blogger custom robots.txt and For sites with blogpost URL, the sitemap works fine.
2. You can and should use this sitemap with your custom generated sitemaps too.
3. Make sure submit the sitemap to Google and Bing webmasters tools and ping it.

The updated sitemap is automatically added to the default robots.txt of Blogger blogs’. Go to robots.txt URL of you blog (blog’s url/robots.txt, like this: http://www.yourdomain.com/robots.txt) and it should look like this.

User-agent: Mediapartners-Google
Disallow: 

User-agent: *
Disallow: /search
Allow: /

Sitemap: http://yourdomain.blogspot.com/sitemap.xml

Also you can also add this to the custom robots.txt of Blogger. Hope Google will dish-out more updates for Blogger. Share your thoughts below in the comments.