Workaround: Submit Blogger Blog Sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools (without a Sitemap)

I would expect most blogger (blogspot) blog owners have no idea what, technically, is a sitemap. Nothing against these blog owners. Sites like blogger and tumblr are meant to be simple, fast and easy to write blog posts without technical knowledge.

Thing is, if you’re making blogging for a purpose, gaining readership or trying to sell things by pinning your blogger posts on Pinterest, then you SHOULD want to dot your i’s and cross your t’s.

More people know about Google Analytics, which shows you stats of how visitors got to your blog, and more importantly, what they do once they’re on your blog.

Google Webmaster tools (and Bing has it’s own Bing Webmaster Tools) is the counterpart to that. Google Webmaster tools helps your blog content get indexed by Google faster, and it also shows you in more detail how search engines like Google see your site, if there’s any errors, and how certain pages are ranking on Google. Sure, Google’s robots crawls, and eventually finds, most website content. And if you’re using blogger, which is a Google product, Google will probably find it even sooner. But again, if you’re serious about people seeing your blog, best to have it indexed and registered with all the web authorities like Google and Bing.

Blogger Sitemap Workaround

Blogger doesn’t have a direct sitemap, and you can’t generate a sitemap for Blogger with a plugin like you can for self-hosted WordPress sites.

But really, a sitemap is just a file on your blog, in XML format, that lists information about each of your posts.

What else, that’s already in XML format, has that same information? Your blog feeds! In RSS or atom formats.

So, in your Google Webmaster dashboard, click the menu item

Optimization > Sitemaps

Click Add/Test Sitemap and type the following:

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

OR

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

Explanation

start-index=1

This means the posts you’re listing is the newest post. Remember, posts are usually listed in reverse chronological order. So, the first post, or start-index=1, is also the newest post.

max-results=500

This means you’re listing up to 500 posts. Since we started with the newest post, this will list posts in reverse chronological order to post number 500. The limit allowed is 500, so if you have more than 500 posts, we’ll have to add another sitemap that starts at post number 501, or start-index=501.

More than 500 Posts

As shown above, we can add Blogger sitemaps in 500 post chunks. All you’ve got to do is add another sitemap for the next 500 post chunk, with a different start-index:

Sitemap for post numbers 501-1000:

atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=501&max-results=500

OR

Rss.xml?redirect=false&start-index=501&max-results=500

Sitemap for post numbers 1001-1500:

atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1001&max-results=500

OR

Rss.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1001&max-results=500

Sitemap for post numbers 1501-2000:

atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1501&max-results=500

OR

Rss.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1501&max-results=500

Sitemap for post numbers 2501-3000:

atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=2501&max-results=500

OR

Rss.xml?redirect=false&start-index=2501&max-results=500

and so on… You can keep adding as many sitemaps as you need.