I don’t think I need to explain here how important it is for a blog to be indexed correctly by search engines.
One of the most important aspects here is to correctly indicate where are the sitemaps, as there can be several so that search engines can easily discover our content.
In the case of Blogger / BlogSpot, the sitemap for blog articles is sitemap.xml. For pages (static content) we have another sitemap called sitemap-pages.xml.
For blogs hosted on BlogSpot, with an address such as https://blogname.blogspot.com, the sitemaps will be located at:
https://blogname.blogspot.com/sitemap.xml https://blogname.blogspot.com/sitemap-pages.xml
If your blog has a custom domain with the address https://www.customdomain.tld, the sitemaps can be found at:
https://www.customdomain.tld/sitemap.xml https://www.customdomain.tld/sitemap-pages.xml
Using Atom.xml as sitemap
The old way to get a BlogSpot blog indexed by the search engines was to use the atom.xml feed as a sitemap. By default, this is limited to the last 25 articles, thus specific parameters need to be specified to include more posts. For blogs hosted on BlogSpot, with an address like https://blogname.blogspot.com, we have to use the following syntax for the sitemap:
https://blogname.blogspot.com/atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1&max-results=500
If we have more than 500 posts, we will add another sitemap:
https://blogname.blogspot.com/atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=501&max-results=500
Similarly, if there are more than 1000 posts we will add yet another sitemap
https://blogname.blogspot.com/atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1001&max-results=500
And so on…
If the blog uses a custom domain, the above sitemaps become:
https://www.customdomain.tld/atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1&max-results=500 https://www.customdomain.tld/atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=501&max-results=500 https://www.customdomain.tld/atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1001&max-results=500 …
Note that the Atom.xml feed can be used only to index blog posts. For static pages, one has to use sitemap-pages.xml.
Adding the sitemaps to robots.txt
In Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster tools, we can manually add our sitemaps. However, we may want other search engines to discover the sitemaps too. In this case, it is important to add them to the robots.txt file.
A typical robots.txt file for a BlogSpot hosted blog is:
User-agent: Mediapartners-Google Disallow: User-agent: * Disallow: /search Allow: / Sitemap: https://yourbloggername.tld/sitemap.xml
To add the missing sitemaps we have to go to blogger settings, then enable custom robots.txt. Add the sitemaps to the robots.txt as in the following example:
User-agent: Mediapartners-Google Disallow: User-agent: * Disallow: /search Allow: / Sitemap: https://yourbloggername.tld/sitemap.xml Sitemap: https://yourbloggername.tld/sitemap-pages.xml Sitemap: https://yourbloggername.tld/atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1&max-results=500 Sitemap: https://yourbloggername.tld/atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=501&max-results=500 Sitemap: https://yourbloggername.tld/atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1001&max-results=500
