How to Generate xml sitemap for blogger blogs

xml sitemap is very important for a blog or a website to get indexed in major search engines like google, yahoo, bing. Thus, it is very important to have a sitemap for your blog to get indexed. This file is generally named as "sitemap.xml" in most of the cases. It is just like a directory for your blog.  In most of the platforms the xml sitemap is automatically generated.

Blogger's sitemap

If you are using blogger platform, you does'nt need to generate sitemap manually. It is automatically done by the Crawlers. The crawlers use "Robot.txt" file to generate the sitemap for your blogger. Robots.txt file for your blog will be "yourblog.blogspot.com/robot.txt", see example here http://googleblog.blogspot.com/robots.txt .

Limitation of blogger

The main limitation of blogger's automatically generated sitemap is that, it only generates the sitemap for 26 recent posts. If your blog have more than 26 pages, the sitemap generated will be only for recent 26 posts. the rest of the posts will be missing. Thus, it is not good practice to have such sitemap.

Solution - Generating full sitemap

Here is solution to the blogger's sitemap limitaion. To generate full site map you need to change your "robot.txt" file.

1. Go to Blogger's Dashbord, then Settings -> Search preferences. In Crawlers and indexing section, click on edit of Custom robots.txt
2. Then enable "Enable custom robots.txt content" to "yes".
3. Now, you need to find the total number of your blog posts. You can refer to your "Post" section of blogger's dashboard.
4. After finding the number of blog posts, paste the following code in "Custom robots.txt" section.
   

   For less than 500 posts :

   User-agent: *
   Disallow: /search
   Allow: /
   Sitemap: http://yourblog.blogspot.com/atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1&max-results=500
   
   

   For less than 1000 posts :

   User-agent: *
   Disallow: /search
   Allow: /
   Sitemap: http://yourblog.blogspot.com/atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1&max-results=500
   Sitemap: http://yourblog.blogspot.com/atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=501&max-results=500
   
   

   For less than 1500 posts :

   User-agent: *
   Disallow: /search
   Allow: /
   Sitemap: http://yourblog.blogspot.com/atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1&max-results=500
   Sitemap: http://yourblog.blogspot.com/atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=501&max-results=500
   Sitemap: http://yourblog.blogspot.com/atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1001&max-results=500
   
   NOTE : Don't forget to replace your blog's url with "yourblog.blogspot.com".
5. After replacing your url save your changes by clicking "Save changes".