Google webmaster tool index 26 blogger atom feed urls sitemap

If you are a blogger blogging on the free blogspot environment, you would probably come across updating sitemap through atom 1.0 feed or through Rss 2.0 feed. It is even applicable to wordpress bloggers but wordpress plugins like sitemap will do the work for them.

For those of you who doesn't know importance of sitemap and usage of it, Sitemap is an xml document that is used by search engine crawlers to identify the links from a site that are to be added to their search engine index. That means, the search engine will have all the important links that are given by you and will update accordingly.



What if you wont update your sitemap?
The search engines like Google or yahoo or bing or ask, takes their own time in crawling the newly updated page and sometimes may not find them at all. In that case your effort spent on writing those posts goes off. More posts indexed is directly proportional to more visibility of the site and is directly propertional to more money after all.

Now, coming to the topic, have you ever noticed that you can update the sitemap to google? IF so have you used atom feed? IF yes is your answer. you might have upated the feed url as shown below. This is recommended by google as well.
Atom 1.0: http://your-blog-address.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default
RSS 2.0: http://your-blog-address.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss

Now, suppose you have migrated your site to a new url and you have used custom redirects. then if your site has only 26 latest urls, google might not update your links for ever that are not in the top 26. In that case, you can use a simple trick here forcing google to read the entire sitemap in other words, entire feeds.

Lets say, your site is having 700 odd posts and you want a sitemap that has 1000 links. update google with the sitemap as follows.

http://your-blog-address.blogspot.com/atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1&max-results=1000.

The above syntax orders search engine crawlers to keep updating starting from 1 till 1000 posts.

Now, go to google webmaster central and update the above url in the sitemap list by clicking on the add sitemap button.