There's big news with regards to sitemap files in Blogger. If you have a blog running on Google's Blogger platform, you no longer need to worry about creating and maintaining a custom sitemap and then submitting it to search engines. Google will now automatically create a sitemap file in your root directory, eliminating the need for third-party sitemap services on Blogger.
A good, high-quality sitemap is an integral part of search engine optimization. It offers a really simple way for site owners to share information with every search engine about the content they have on their site instead of having to rely solely on crawling algorithms.
Blogger limitations
Many Content Management Systems such as WordPress let you easily create a sitemap with either native or third-party support. This includes Blogger as well.
Blogger, as you might know, is pretty limited. Blogger users can not access the root directory of their blog. Their content remains hosted at Google even if they have a custom domain. The ftp directory your web hosts creates can allow you to only host files at sub-domains, and if you try hosting files at the root directory, Blogger will return a 404 error.
As a consequence, the only good way of submitting a sitemap for Blogger was to submit an RSS or Atom feed, since it does almost the same thing and is in xml format as well.
Automatic sitemaps
There is good news though. You no longer need to do all that to submit a sitemap. Google will now automatically create a sitemap for your Blogger blog, and that too on your root directory. You can view it at http://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml (e.g. http://www.mybloggertricks.com/sitemap.xml)
Not only that, the sitemap file further contains links to pages like:
- http://www.mybloggertricks.com/sitemap.xml?page=1
- http://www.mybloggertricks.com/sitemap.xml?page=2
- http://www.mybloggertricks.com/sitemap.xml?page=3
I think this is a very welcome step, and I hope the Blogger teams will provide customization options as well for the sitemap. If you have any questions, or want to participate in the discussion, then please feel free to join us on our discussion form where we talk about creating a sitemap for Blogger.
Good luck (:
