Changing your Blogger blog to a custom domain is a big step forward, which has a positive impact on increasing the credibility of the brand. Though, according to the change, it’s necessary to revise the sitemap as it relates to improvements or deterioration of the site’s SERP rank. Sometimes, people change the domain of their website, and new sitemap helps search engines in properly indexing the content of your site under the new domain so that it can easily be found by users.
This is an added advantage as it helps in improving your site’s SEO as users are likely to gain more trust with a customizable URL that easily sticks in the minds of the users. It can also improve keyword placement and likely improves the site’s ranking within search engine results. However, if your sitemap is not updated, the search engines may not relate your content with the new domain and thus reduce the SEO impact.
Sitemaps are helpful tools for site structure mapping in order to make the work of search engine crawlers easy and help to find out all pages of the site. This kind of change to your site’s sitemap makes it easier for the search engines to index your site’s new URL and its meta data when you replicate your site to a new custom domain which is very crucial for sustenance and optimization of its search visibility.
When a blogger converts his blog to a custom domain and forgets to update the sitemap, there are several problems that he or she can experience: The links that are originally set in the blogspot will not work, the blog will not be properly indexed and thus , it will experience low traffic especially from the search engines. This may make search engines to continue directing visitors to your old domain instead of the new one, thus you lose on traffic and potential to get more visitors. These risks are minimized when a new sitemap is created frequently while the transition is seamless.
Understanding Your New Custom Domain
When ever you decide to use your own domain all the links that are available in your blog will be replaced by new domian. What this is is that old URL’s will not lead to the new content unless the necessary redirects are put in place, this is why it is important to update your sitemaps to contain these new URL’s for your site to remain accessible and indexed by search engines.
The use of a custom domain gives your blog a professional Public Facing Identifier giving the blog better credibility and memorability. This gives your blog a unique look different from the ordinary subdomains, and thus earns it a better brand image than that of the subdomains which will in turn make your followers to have more or greater trust and recognition in your blog.
Custom domain may be useful in improving the accessibility of the blog in addition to enhancing the ease of users in locating the blog. It may also help in improving the overall SEO rankings because popular and trusted, the domains are considered to be more popular and getting more traffic and more users.
Generating a New Sitemap for Your Custom Domain
For creating a new sitemap in the Blogger log in to your account and go to the setting option where you will find the “Crawlers and Indexing” option there you can view your present sitemap and you also have a provision for creating a new sitemap. This new sitemap should contain URL’s, which reflect the new custom domain so as to help search engines to properly index your content.
But after creating a new sitemap, one should ensure that all the urls in this sitemap are associated with the new custom domain. This can be done by opening the sitemap file if available, or using tools such as the Google Search Console in order to verify that the sitemap conforms to the correct format and contains all the blog’s published pages.
Suggestions for an effective sitemap are as follows: the sitemap is simple, has all the important pages and is dynamic to accommodate changes. Do not add multi-ple pages of similar contents and load the sitemap with proper XML formatting and meta data for better indexing with the search engines.
Submitting Your New Sitemap to Search Engines
In order to add a new sitemap to the Google Search Console, you need to log in to your account, choose your property and go to the “Sitemaps” tab. Input the new URL of your sitemap and click on the “Submit” button, this will notify Google of the new sitemap, this is very helpful in cases you have changed the domain of your website so that all your content is reindexed under the new domain .
Further for other search engines such as Bing and Yahoo, try the respective webmaster tools or search console. Go to webmaster tools section and find the sitemap submission option there; put in your new sitemap URL and submit it. This ensures that the said search engines also crawl your updated sitemap and create an accurate index across the various media.
After submission, always monitor the status of your sitemap within the search engine tools which you employed. Check out for any reported problems and supervise the indexing status and continually to ensure that all the pages are properly indexed and ranked. This way you monitor important metrics and are able to identify and fix issues on time or at least know that your website is not as visible as it could be to search engines.
Troubleshooting Common Issues
If the sitemap you have developed has generated errors or warnings, then you ought to analyze the details that the search engines tools have indicated. Some of such issues may involve such things as wrong URLs or poor format of some used links. To remedy these problems, correct the sitemap file and resubmit it so that it complies with proper standards in its indexing.
When you find that URLs are not being indexed, then it may have crawl errors, blocked resources or wrong sitemap URLs. Solve these issues using search engines to check URLs of your newly developed custom domain and format them as well as enhance search engine indexing.
For traffic and seo purpose, you would need to set a 301 rewrite from your old urls to the new ones on your custom domain. It is helpful in directing users and search engines to the updated link and the appropriate links instead of directing them to the wrong links or non-existing pages since it reduces the cases of broken links and keeps your site’s search engine rating.
Maintaining Your Sitemap Moving Forward
Make sure you are updating your sitemap frequently depending on the new content, modification or even the elimination of existing content in your site. When you say it’s ok, make sure to check its general cleanliness, structures and if it has followed SEO friendly guidelines. When you update your sitemap, search engines will be able to easily crawl and index your blog which in turn improves visibility and performance of the blog.
You should update your sitemap each time you add or remove important content, adjust the site’s structure or use it significantly. It provides new content to the search engines so that they are always updated on your web pages as well as on the changes that have occurred on your website.
There are so many SEO tools available such as Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools, and lots of Plugins to check the health of sitemap. These tools help you in ascertaining the indexing status as well as possible errors and thus enables one to work on it in order to have proper search engine appearance.
Conclusion
Again, it is essential to update the sitemap frequently to ensure that new changes done to the site are easily detected by search engines and indexed to add value to the site’s SEO performance. So, keeping your sitemap up-to-date is always more effective for your blog’s visibility and traffic as it enhances its accessibility.
When used optimally, custom domains can help increase SEO ranking and engagement with your site content, keywords, and backlinking. Further, ensure the optimal use of your custom domain and develop a friendly site layout and utilize the effective SEO techniques for the better search engine rankings.
When it comes to getting more and more people to read your blog, it is crucial to post frequently and post only good posts, respond to comments, participate in social media and offer readers something irresistible, such as new posts or newsletters. Having a flow of readership not only increases traffic but at the same time firmed up the success and reliability of the blog.