Submit a Sitemap to help Google crawl your site

If your new site or blog is not often crawled by Google, adding a Sitemap (with a capital S) will speed things up a bit. Google crawls a site based on the incoming and outgoing links a site have and how often the contents are updated. So if you weren't able to update your site then Google will reduce its crawl frequency.

Submitting a Sitemap will allow Google to check the updated contents of your site thus helping it crawl your site.

Here's how I was able to add a Sitemap for this blogspot.com site.

1. Go to Google Webmaster tools and log in or sign up for an account
   
2. In the Dashboard, Add your site in the text field
3. After adding your site, click Sitemaps from the left menu.
4. Choose Add Sitemap
5. Select Add General Web Sitemap as the type
6. Then use atom.xml as your XML file in the Sitemap URL

That's it! Just wait for Google's report after 24 hours.

Note: If you're using Feedburner as your Post Feed Redirect URL, using atom.xml might not work. Instead, use atom.xml?redirect=false.

Problem with atom.xml

There's a problem though with using atom.xml as your site Sitemap. It only contains the last 25 posts of your blog. You also can't create your own Sitemap in Blogger.com so we're stuck with atom.xml.

But there's a solution though. Simply add this query to your Sitemap URL:

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

That is the Sitemap for posts 1-100. If you have more than 100 posts, add another Sitemap URL and replace the start-index and max-results value to 101 and 200.

There you go! Although it won't necessarily mean your pagerank would increase, at least your updated content will be seen when doing Google search.