How to make a Google sitemap

Blogger users always have some disadvantages over submitting a sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools; we can't publish a real sitemap to the domain we are using. We can only submit partial sitemap using the default site feeds, which sadly only contain the last 25 posts. When Blogger introduced Feed Redirection (to FeedBurner or others), it only made matters worse: you couldn't submit a sitemap just so easily. However, there is a secret trick that will fix the problem in submitting a sitemap when feed redirection is enabled, which will also enable submitting not just the last 25 posts that you have, but all posts.

NO FEED REDIRECTION
If you haven't enabled feed redirection, then you won't have hard time submitting a sitemap. What you will need to do is just go to Google Webmaster and click Sitemaps on the left sidebar. This is assuming you already have logged in to Google of course. This is followed by clicking Add Sitemap and then choose Add General Web Sitemap in the Choose Type drop-down option. Once done, you just have to affix atom.xml or rss.xml (or both, but key them one after the other) on the blank space provided so that the whole sitemap URL looks like one of these.

http://yourblog.blogspot.com/atom.xml
http://yourblog.blogspot.com/rss.xml

Of course, the yourblog is already provided in the site.

FOR REDIRECTED FEEDS
The codes to be affixed for Blogger blogs that have their feeds redirected is atom.xml?redirect=false or rss.xml?redirect=false. Well, either will work. This will keep the feed from redirecting and is now usable as a sitemap at GWT.

SUBMIT ALL YOUR POSTS

The root-level Blogger feeds did not accept any query parameters before. However, when Blogger enabled feed redirection, query parameters can now be accepted. With this you can submit more than the standard 25 of your latest posts.

You need to figure out how many published posts there are in your blog. Currently, Blogger limits max-results to 500 entries, although this may sometimes go up and down. There are times in which it would only allow 100. It really varies.

Supposing today if you made another sitemap and Google Webmaster allows only 100 entries, you need to copy the code below. (You can change 100 to your number of posts if Google Webmaster today allows more than that.)

atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1&max-results=100

If you have added the code above as sitemap, and then your posts are over 100 and GWT only allowed 100 entries per sitemap, then the code below will be of help.

atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=101&max-results=100

If you noticed, the difference lies between the start-index. The first code is =1 and the second is =101. The first sitemap started at 1 and returned 100 results, the second sitemap uses the start-index of 101 (100+1). This will automatically cover your next 100 posts (so 200 now all in all). But if you had more than 200 posts, you should re-create another sitemap with the start-index of 201. You get the drift?

Although adding a sitemap might help your blog, Google will still probably crawl Blogger blogs even without a sitemap of any kind as Blogger blogs are not difficult to crawl. But compared to nothing, having a sitemap will really eventually help. Adding one or two won't hurt you anyway.

Here's a screenshot of Blogger-Aid's sitemap. Just click it to enlarge.