Blogger + Feedburner and Uploading a Sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools
Many bloggers who have chosen the service blogspot.com (Blogger) as their platform for blogging sooner or later encounter some limitations caused by the use of a “foreign” domain.
These restrictions are mainly due to the fact that the user cannot freely manage files on the hosting, uploading full-fledged scripts (like what Sape.ru proposes to do), as well as create full-fledged site maps.
Adding a map to Google Webmasters Tools is necessary so that Googlebot sees all the pages of our blog and as soon as possible (just can’t wait) indexed them. As such a card for the Blogger engine, it is often recommended to take the standard RSS-feed located at BLOG.blogspot.com/rss.xml . The problems begin after the blogger begins to use the Feedburner service to keep statistics on RSS subscribers. For this service, Blogger has a special redirect option (Toolbar - Settings - Site Feed - “Message Feed Redirect URL”), which allows you to work with Feedburner, but completely cuts off the ability to add a standard RSS feed as a sitemap in Google Webmasters Tools . The fact is that after the redirect, the feed already looks not like BLOG.blogspot.com/rss.xml , but like feeds.feedburner.com/BLOG , which is already suspicious for Google Webmasters Tools , as a result it does not accept such sitemaps . In general, the Blogger engine itself is not a fool, and more recently, every blog has a robots.txt file in its root with a link to the default map: BLOG.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?orderby=updated . How we managed to establish in the process of correspondence in the blog “The Quixotic Engineer” (you can read the discussion - curious ideas for solving the problem were suggested), if you add URLs to the Webmasters Tools URL of the form BLOG.blogspot.com/rss.xml?order=updated , the redirect is not going on. It would seem, here it is, Happiness.
')
But it was not there. It turned out we faced another limitation. The site map thus generated tells Google only information about the last 25 posts. A partial solution may be to add a standard BlogArchive widget to the template. It allows you to have links to all blog posts from each page. Thus, Googlebot somehow gets information about the structure of the site by 25 URL messages.
But, in general, all described hemorrhoids, as usual, turned out to be completely unnecessary. Recently, I found the right, in my opinion, elegant solution to add a blog map to Google Webmasters Tools (GWT) without restrictions on the number of posts and any unnecessary distortions.
My translation of the original article , according to tradition, is free, and I publish it in this article.
So let's get started.
In order to submit to GWT the full feed of a blog located on the Blogger service, you need to use the feed from the site root:
Naturally, you need to replace yourblog with the appropriate part of your blog's URL, or replace yourblog.blogspot.com with the URL of your domain (if you use an external domain).
It does not matter which of the feeds you will use, since both atom.xml and rss.xml will work, the only difference being that different formats are used (in the first case it is Atom , in the second - RSS ).
If the feed redirect option is used (as described above), it is necessary to stop this redirect. This is done with the help of an additional option:
This wonderful option will prevent feed from being redirected to Feedburner and such a URL ( yourblog.blogspot.com/atom.xml?redirect=false ) can be successfully entered into the GWT .
Previously, the root views in Blogger did not allow the use of any additional parameters. But by adding the “redirect = false” option processing, the developers opened ways to use other standard feed options in Blogger. It is with these options that we will be able to add more than 25 posts! First of all, estimate the total number of posts in your blog (you can determine this number on the page “Toolbar” - “Submit” - “Edit posts” by highlighting “Published” posts). After that, you can use the max-results and start-index parameters to increase the number of results obtained, and also use several maps if required. Warning: At this point, Blogger limits the value of the max-results parameter to 500 elements. This restriction has already changed several times, both upwards and downwards, so it can still change. Now the limit is 500, but there was a time when it was 100 records.
I will use a limit of 100 entries in my examples, but you can use a larger limit if you wish. So, in order to get the first 100 posts, our query will look like this:
Further, if there are more than 100 posts on my blog (I currently have 105 posts), I can create another card using the following URL:
As you noticed, you need to change the value of the “start-index” parameter to a number equal to the number of records received in the request. So, the first card started from the first post and transferred 100 records to the GWT, the second card should start from the 101st (100 + 1) post. So we created a map for the next 95 messages. They will be automatically counted by Google, since maps are downloaded at regular intervals (usually once a day).
Below is the image of my blog card in GWT, which I have been working with for almost a month:
Having said all this, it remains to add only two things. The first is that I do not think that all these manipulations will help much (if they help at all). Blogs posted on Blogger are easy to index, so it’s possible that Google will index them just as well as without any site map. Second, if you wanted to create a non-RSS feed sitemap using any sitemap generation utility, then, according to a recent post on Google Webmaster Central Blog , you can upload the sitemap file to Blogspot via another trusted site ( perhaps googlepages? I haven't checked it yet).
Note from the translator. As for me, I followed this guide, adding to the GWT a bunch of sitemap for the future, and then I don’t worry more about this topic:
These restrictions are mainly due to the fact that the user cannot freely manage files on the hosting, uploading full-fledged scripts (like what Sape.ru proposes to do), as well as create full-fledged site maps.
Adding a map to Google Webmasters Tools is necessary so that Googlebot sees all the pages of our blog and as soon as possible (just can’t wait) indexed them. As such a card for the Blogger engine, it is often recommended to take the standard RSS-feed located at BLOG.blogspot.com/rss.xml . The problems begin after the blogger begins to use the Feedburner service to keep statistics on RSS subscribers. For this service, Blogger has a special redirect option (Toolbar - Settings - Site Feed - “Message Feed Redirect URL”), which allows you to work with Feedburner, but completely cuts off the ability to add a standard RSS feed as a sitemap in Google Webmasters Tools . The fact is that after the redirect, the feed already looks not like BLOG.blogspot.com/rss.xml , but like feeds.feedburner.com/BLOG , which is already suspicious for Google Webmasters Tools , as a result it does not accept such sitemaps . In general, the Blogger engine itself is not a fool, and more recently, every blog has a robots.txt file in its root with a link to the default map: BLOG.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?orderby=updated . How we managed to establish in the process of correspondence in the blog “The Quixotic Engineer” (you can read the discussion - curious ideas for solving the problem were suggested), if you add URLs to the Webmasters Tools URL of the form BLOG.blogspot.com/rss.xml?order=updated , the redirect is not going on. It would seem, here it is, Happiness.
')
But it was not there. It turned out we faced another limitation. The site map thus generated tells Google only information about the last 25 posts. A partial solution may be to add a standard BlogArchive widget to the template. It allows you to have links to all blog posts from each page. Thus, Googlebot somehow gets information about the structure of the site by 25 URL messages.
But, in general, all described hemorrhoids, as usual, turned out to be completely unnecessary. Recently, I found the right, in my opinion, elegant solution to add a blog map to Google Webmasters Tools (GWT) without restrictions on the number of posts and any unnecessary distortions.
My translation of the original article , according to tradition, is free, and I publish it in this article.
So let's get started.
Preparing a blog card for the GWT
In order to submit to GWT the full feed of a blog located on the Blogger service, you need to use the feed from the site root:
yourblog.blogspot.com/atom.xml
yourblog.blogspot.com/rss.xml
Naturally, you need to replace yourblog with the appropriate part of your blog's URL, or replace yourblog.blogspot.com with the URL of your domain (if you use an external domain).
It does not matter which of the feeds you will use, since both atom.xml and rss.xml will work, the only difference being that different formats are used (in the first case it is Atom , in the second - RSS ).
Disable redirect
If the feed redirect option is used (as described above), it is necessary to stop this redirect. This is done with the help of an additional option:
atom.xml? redirect = false
This wonderful option will prevent feed from being redirected to Feedburner and such a URL ( yourblog.blogspot.com/atom.xml?redirect=false ) can be successfully entered into the GWT .
Transfer all your posts
Previously, the root views in Blogger did not allow the use of any additional parameters. But by adding the “redirect = false” option processing, the developers opened ways to use other standard feed options in Blogger. It is with these options that we will be able to add more than 25 posts! First of all, estimate the total number of posts in your blog (you can determine this number on the page “Toolbar” - “Submit” - “Edit posts” by highlighting “Published” posts). After that, you can use the max-results and start-index parameters to increase the number of results obtained, and also use several maps if required. Warning: At this point, Blogger limits the value of the max-results parameter to 500 elements. This restriction has already changed several times, both upwards and downwards, so it can still change. Now the limit is 500, but there was a time when it was 100 records.
I will use a limit of 100 entries in my examples, but you can use a larger limit if you wish. So, in order to get the first 100 posts, our query will look like this:
atom.xml? redirect = false & start-index = 1 & max results = 100
Further, if there are more than 100 posts on my blog (I currently have 105 posts), I can create another card using the following URL:
atom.xml? redirect = false & start-index = 101 & max results = 100
As you noticed, you need to change the value of the “start-index” parameter to a number equal to the number of records received in the request. So, the first card started from the first post and transferred 100 records to the GWT, the second card should start from the 101st (100 + 1) post. So we created a map for the next 95 messages. They will be automatically counted by Google, since maps are downloaded at regular intervals (usually once a day).
Below is the image of my blog card in GWT, which I have been working with for almost a month:
Having said all this, it remains to add only two things. The first is that I do not think that all these manipulations will help much (if they help at all). Blogs posted on Blogger are easy to index, so it’s possible that Google will index them just as well as without any site map. Second, if you wanted to create a non-RSS feed sitemap using any sitemap generation utility, then, according to a recent post on Google Webmaster Central Blog , you can upload the sitemap file to Blogspot via another trusted site ( perhaps googlepages? I haven't checked it yet).
Note from the translator. As for me, I followed this guide, adding to the GWT a bunch of sitemap for the future, and then I don’t worry more about this topic:
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/31290/
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