Blogger, Feedburner, Sitemaps and Submitting All Your Posts

Blogger, Feedburner, Sitemaps and Submitting All Your Posts


Blogger users who wanted to submit a sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools have always had some disadvantages. Since we can't publish a real sitemap to the domain we are using we had to settle for only submitting a partial sitemap by using our default site feeds (which only contain the last 25 posts). Add to that confusion when Blogger introduced Feed Redirection (to FeedBurner or others) made things even trickier, as for awhile if you chose the feed redirection option, then you couldn't submit a sitemap. Fortunately Blogger came up with a super secret option (so secret they never bothered to tell anyone) that fixes the problem for submitting a sitemap when feed direction is enabled ( hat tip to Amit for letting their secret out). And in the same step opened up a way to submit all your posts in a sitemap, instead of just the last 25.

So, starting at the beginning. To submit a Blogspot hosted blogs feed as a sitemap to GWT, you have to use the root-level feed that Blogger provides.

http://yourblog.blogspot.com/atom.xml
http://yourblog.blogspot.com/rss.xml

Of course change yourblog to your blog name, or using your custom domain. Which one you choose doesn't matter really, one is Atom and one is RSS format. Either will work.

Taking care of the redirect

If you are using the redirect option on your feed, you can add a query parameter to stop the redirect on your feed in the format of (I'm only giving the filename paths here)

atom.xml?redirect=false


That will keep the feed from redirecting and is now usable as a sitemap at GWT.

Submitting all your posts

Previously the root-level Blogger feeds did not accept any query parameters, but when Blogger added the redirect=false one, they also seemed to open up those feeds to all the known Blogger query parameters. And that's how you can submit more than the standard 25 posts. First off, figure out how many posts you have (you can do this at the Blogger Edit Post page and selecting only published posts, it will tell you how many total you have). Then you can use the max-results and start-index parameters to expand the number of results obtained, and to submit more than one map if needed. Note: Currently Blogger limits the max-results to 500 entries. This has gone up and down a couple of times so it could change. As of right now the upper limit appears to be 500. But 100 was the limit at one time.

I'm going to use the max limit of 100 in my examples, you can use more if that's what you want. So to get the first set of 100 posts the url I'd submit would be

atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1&max-results=100


Then, if I have more than 100 posts (I currently have 105) I can create another sitemap with the url

/atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=101&max-results=100


If you notice, just increase the start-index number by the amount of results you are getting. So the first sitemap started at 1, and returned 100 results, the second sitemap would use the start-index of 101 (100+1). Now that should automatically cover me for the next 95 posts. If I had more than 200 posts, just create another sitemap with the start-index of 201 (you get the idea). GWT will automatically download the sitemaps (usually about once a day) and if I've made a new post it should get added to the mix. Here's a screenshot of my current sitemaps in GWT, which I've been doing this way for almost a month.



Having said all that, two last things. One, I don't really think all of this helps any (if at all). Blogger blogs aren't that difficult to crawl and Google will probably crawl your blog just as well with or without a sitemap of any kind. Two, if you really wanted to create a non-feed sitemap with some sort of sitemap generating tool, then according to this recent post at Google Webmaster Central Blog, you could upload a sitemap for blogspot through another verified site (like maybe googlepages? I haven't really tried it).