Blogger + Feedburner and Download Sitemap in Google Webmaster Tools
- Transfer
Many bloggers who choose blogspot.com (Blogger) as their blogging platform will sooner or later encounter some limitations caused by using a “foreign” domain.
The mentioned limitations are mainly caused by the fact that the user cannot freely manage files on the hosting, downloading full scripts (like what Sape.ru offers to do ), as well as creating full 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 map for the Blogger engine, it is often recommended to take the standard RSS feed located atBLOG.blogspot.com/rss.xml . The problems begin after the blogger begins to use the Feedburner service to maintain statistics on RSS subscribers. Blogger has a special redirect option for working with this service (Toolbar - Settings - Site Channel - “Message Channel Forwarding URLs”), which allows working with Feedburner, but completely cuts off the ability to add a standard RSS feed as a site map in Google Webmasters Tools . The fact is that after the redirect, the feed no longer looks like BLOG.blogspot.com/rss.xml , but like feeds.feedburner.com/BLOG , which for Google Webmasters ToolsIt looks already suspicious, as a result of which he does not accept such site maps. In general, the Blogger engine itself is not a fool, and recently, every blog contains a robots.txt file with a link to the default map: BLOG.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?orderby=updated . How did we manage to establish during the correspondence on the blog “The Quixotic Engineer” (you can read the discussion - interesting ideas for solving the problem were suggested) if we add URLs of the form BLOG.blogspot.com/rss.xml?orderby=updated to Google Webmasters Tools , the redirect is not going on. It would seem that this is happiness.
But it was not there. It turned out we were faced with another limitation. The site map thus formed informs Google of only 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 of its pages. Thus, Googlebot somehow gets information about the structure of the site by 25 message URLs.
But, in general, all described hemorrhoids, as usual, were not needed at all. Recently, I found a correct, in my opinion, elegant solution that allows you to add a blog map to Google Webmasters Tools (GWT) without restrictions on the number of posts and any unnecessary perversions.
My translation of the original article, by tradition, free, and I publish in this article.
So let's get started.
To submit the full feed of a blog hosted on Blogger to GWT , you need to use the feed from the root of the site:
Naturally, you need to replace “yourblog” with the corresponding part of the URL of your blog, or replace “yourblog.blogspot.com” with the URL of your domain (if you use an external domain).
It doesn’t matter which of the feeds you use, as both atom.xml and rss.xml will work, with the only difference being that different formats are used (in the first case, Atom , in the second, RSS ).
If the feed redirect option is used (as described above), this redirect must be suppressed. This is done using an additional option:
This wonderful option will prevent the feed from being redirected to Feedburner and such a URL ( yourblog.blogspot.com/atom.xml?redirect=false ) can be successfully specified in GWT .
Previously, Blogger’s root views did not allow any additional options to be applied. But by adding the processing of the “redirect = false” option, the developers opened up ways to use other standard feed options in Blogger. It is with these options that we can submit more than 25 posts! First things first, estimate how many posts are in your blog (you can determine this number on the "Toolbar" - "Sending" - "Edit Messages" page 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 cards, if necessary. Note: Blogger currently limits the value of the max-results parameter to 500 elements. This restriction has already changed several times, both in the direction of increasing and decreasing, therefore, it can still change. Now the limit is 500, but there was a time when it was 100 records.
I will use the 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 request will look like this:
Further, if there are more than 100 posts on my blog (I currently have 105 posts), I can create another map 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 entries to the GWT, the second card should start from the 101st (100 + 1) post. Thus, we created a map for the next 95 messages. They will be automatically taken into account by Google, because the maps are downloaded at regular intervals (usually once a day).
Below is an image of a map of my blog in GWT that 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 at all). Blogs hosted on Blogger are easy to index, so perhaps Google will index them as well as they would without any sitemap. Second: if you wanted to create a sitemap not based on the RSS feed using any sitemap generating utility, then, according to a recent post on Google Webmaster Central Blog , you can upload the sitemap file to Blogspot through another trusted site ( maybe googlepages? I haven't tested it yet).
Note from the translator. As for me, I followed this guideline by adding a bunch of sitemap to the GWT for the future, after which I am no longer worried about this topic:
The mentioned limitations are mainly caused by the fact that the user cannot freely manage files on the hosting, downloading full scripts (like what Sape.ru offers to do ), as well as creating full 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 map for the Blogger engine, it is often recommended to take the standard RSS feed located atBLOG.blogspot.com/rss.xml . The problems begin after the blogger begins to use the Feedburner service to maintain statistics on RSS subscribers. Blogger has a special redirect option for working with this service (Toolbar - Settings - Site Channel - “Message Channel Forwarding URLs”), which allows working with Feedburner, but completely cuts off the ability to add a standard RSS feed as a site map in Google Webmasters Tools . The fact is that after the redirect, the feed no longer looks like BLOG.blogspot.com/rss.xml , but like feeds.feedburner.com/BLOG , which for Google Webmasters ToolsIt looks already suspicious, as a result of which he does not accept such site maps. In general, the Blogger engine itself is not a fool, and recently, every blog contains a robots.txt file with a link to the default map: BLOG.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?orderby=updated . How did we manage to establish during the correspondence on the blog “The Quixotic Engineer” (you can read the discussion - interesting ideas for solving the problem were suggested) if we add URLs of the form BLOG.blogspot.com/rss.xml?orderby=updated to Google Webmasters Tools , the redirect is not going on. It would seem that this is happiness.
But it was not there. It turned out we were faced with another limitation. The site map thus formed informs Google of only 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 of its pages. Thus, Googlebot somehow gets information about the structure of the site by 25 message URLs.
But, in general, all described hemorrhoids, as usual, were not needed at all. Recently, I found a correct, in my opinion, elegant solution that allows you to add a blog map to Google Webmasters Tools (GWT) without restrictions on the number of posts and any unnecessary perversions.
My translation of the original article, by tradition, free, and I publish in this article.
So let's get started.
Preparing a Blog Map for GWT
To submit the full feed of a blog hosted on Blogger to GWT , you need to use the feed from the root of the site:
yourblog.blogspot.com/atom.xml
yourblog.blogspot.com/rss.xml
Naturally, you need to replace “yourblog” with the corresponding part of the URL of your blog, or replace “yourblog.blogspot.com” with the URL of your domain (if you use an external domain).
It doesn’t matter which of the feeds you use, as both atom.xml and rss.xml will work, with the only difference being that different formats are used (in the first case, Atom , in the second, RSS ).
Disabling redirect
If the feed redirect option is used (as described above), this redirect must be suppressed. This is done using an additional option:
atom.xml? redirect = false
This wonderful option will prevent the feed from being redirected to Feedburner and such a URL ( yourblog.blogspot.com/atom.xml?redirect=false ) can be successfully specified in GWT .
Submission of all your posts
Previously, Blogger’s root views did not allow any additional options to be applied. But by adding the processing of the “redirect = false” option, the developers opened up ways to use other standard feed options in Blogger. It is with these options that we can submit more than 25 posts! First things first, estimate how many posts are in your blog (you can determine this number on the "Toolbar" - "Sending" - "Edit Messages" page 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 cards, if necessary. Note: Blogger currently limits the value of the max-results parameter to 500 elements. This restriction has already changed several times, both in the direction of increasing and decreasing, therefore, it can still change. Now the limit is 500, but there was a time when it was 100 records.
I will use the 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 request 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 map 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 entries to the GWT, the second card should start from the 101st (100 + 1) post. Thus, we created a map for the next 95 messages. They will be automatically taken into account by Google, because the maps are downloaded at regular intervals (usually once a day).
Below is an image of a map of my blog in GWT that 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 at all). Blogs hosted on Blogger are easy to index, so perhaps Google will index them as well as they would without any sitemap. Second: if you wanted to create a sitemap not based on the RSS feed using any sitemap generating utility, then, according to a recent post on Google Webmaster Central Blog , you can upload the sitemap file to Blogspot through another trusted site ( maybe googlepages? I haven't tested it yet).
Note from the translator. As for me, I followed this guideline by adding a bunch of sitemap to the GWT for the future, after which I am no longer worried about this topic:
