Submit Blogger sitemap to Google, Yahoo and Bing

Sitemaps let search engines to know more about the structure of your website. Blogs, like any other websites, can improve their visibility on the Internet, by adding their XML sitemaps to the major search engines (Google, Yahoo and Bing).

The problem with Blogger is that you can’t upload your own sitemap or any other file to your blogspot sub-domain root (ex. http://sub-domain.blogspot.com/) or custom domain root (ex. http://www.yanniel.info/).

No panic! There’s a workaround for this: luckily for bloggers, sitemaps can be generated as feeds; meaning that you can actually submit an RSS or Atom feed as a valid sitemap.

Blogger supports both RSS and Atom formats. Anyway, I advice you use the Atom feed URL, because I have had problems when submitting the RSS URL. What problems?  Well, I don’t recall now, but I’m pretty sure I had problems ;-)

Here is the Atom sitemap URL for Blogger (it does work for both blogspot sub-domain and custom domains):

http://sub-domain.blogspot.com/atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1&max-results=500

http://www. customdomain/atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1&max-results=500

Basically, the important part is:

atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1&max-results=500

A brief explanation:

• atom.xml express the fact that you are requesting an XML Atom feed.
• redirect=false prevents  Blogger from redirecting your sitemap to a third-party sitemap burner. This is very useful if you are using FeedBurner, because FeedBurner feeds are not recognized as valid sitemaps in most cases.
• start-index=1 indicates that you want to syndicate starting on your first post. If you chose 10, for instance, your sitemap will start at post number 10.
• max-results=500 tells Blogger to include 500 posts in your sitemap.  You can change this number as well, but the maximum count of posts syndicated in your feed will never exceed 500.

So, what happens if my blog has more than 500 posts? Well, you simply add a second sitemap, a third and so on. See the URLs:

http://sub-domain.blogspot.com/atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1&max-results=500

http://sub-domain.blogspot.com/atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=501&max-results=500

http://sub-domain.blogspot.com/atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1001&max-results=500

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There’s only one thing pending: you need to add your sitemaps to the major search engines…

• For Google, you use Google WebMaster Tools (signing in is required)
• For Yahoo, you use Yahoo! Site Explorer (signing in is required)
• For Bing, you use Bing WebMaster Tools (signing in is required)

Submitting your sitemaps for each search engine is a slightly different process. I might cover those SEO topics in future posts.

Listing my blog on Technorati and TopOfBlogs

Note from the blog owner: This article is outdated; it is kept here for historical reasons.

Yanniel's notes is now alive in Technorati and TopOfBlogs. Both sites give authentic backlinks to your blog, as they don't implement the rel=”nofollow” attribute in the HTML <a ... tag.

Technorati is a blog search engine and directory, which in my humble opinion is very professional and well established. In fact, I prefer to use Technorati rather than Google Blog Search to browse and search the blogosphere. The bad thing about Technorati is that it only allows blogs in English.

TopOfBlogs is a blog directory that has gained strong popularity lately. It ranks the blogs according to several variables, which converge in a general rank value for each blog. TopOfBlogs is far from been as professional as Technorati, but it covers all languages and cultures.

Both sites perform a manual revision of each blog you claim (submit). The purpose is to fight spam and to allow only authentic content to be listed. Of course, spammers are quite smart these days and the battle cannot be won just by the initial moderators' revision.

There's much more about  Technorati and TopOfBlogs. I intend to talk about them in further posts.