Thursday, October 12, 2006

Google Webmaster Tools and HOWTO add a sitemap for Blogger/blogspot.com

The setting up of a Sitemap file for a Blogger/Blogspot.com is an easy thing to do. The question of what is a Sitemap file and why should I have one? is answered here

Prerequite:
(1) your site setup/verified in Google Webmaster Tools (more on that here my blog entry on that).

HOWTO:
(1) Login to Webmaster Tools (link)
(2) Click On the Add a Sitemap link
(3) Choose Add General Sitemap
(4) type in: *********.blogspot.com/rss.xml (your blog name for *********)
(5) Click on Add Sitemap button.

You are done! That is it. Simple.

After posting this I found that there is also an equivelant site at Yahoo - Yahoo Site Explorer It functions similarly and you could basically do the same thing over there.

6 comments:

Andrew Georgy-Embree said...

Helpful! Thanks for the link (and the US$).

Anonymous said...

Oh, cool, learn something new every day.

One question though, does Google just "know" that there is more than provided by the RSS feed, or does it not really matter as long as your newer posts get mapped "sooner"?

Paul Cooley said...

Of course the actaul internals of what google is really doing under the hood is going to be hush, hush so that we cannot manipulate results (much).

The sitemap submission is more of a push model, indicating that we (the webmaster) have updates for Google to reindex. The suspect idea is to push the updates, not the whole site. The older content should already be a part of their database.

The normal pull model of crawling is constantly happening in the background. This would capture the 'other' data that isn't a part of your RSS feed.

Anonymous said...

Very Useful ...Excellent work

Anonymous said...

been weeks searching this method, finally I got you boss..thanks ! It is too easy to be true. I just wonder, if as easy as this tweak, why google doesn't publish it in their webmaster tools ? I/O making xml file and uploading it to server. Any fishy here ?

David said...

Thanks a lot for the explanation, very helpful!