Provide A Sitemap, To Enable Indexing Of Pages

With (static) pages becoming a popular component in our blogs, we are seeing a few queries about getting pages content indexed.

We see an occasional query, in Blogger Help Forum: Learn More About Blogger, which leads to using the new pages sitemap.

How do I get pages indexed?

Aside from the design issue, where not all blog owners should want pages indexed, there should not be an issue here.

Blogger provides two automatically generated sitemaps, for each blog. This blog has

http://blogging.nitecruzr.net/sitemap.xml
http://blogging.nitecruzr.net/sitemap-pages.xml

Most blogs use the posts sitemap - and ignore the pages sitemap.

If you look at the "robots.txt" file for this blog, you see the first sitemap in use. The file for your blog, if standard, should be similar.

http://blogging.nitecruzr.net/robots.txt

User-agent: Mediapartners-Google
Disallow: 

User-agent: *
Disallow: /search
Allow: /

Sitemap: http://blogging.nitecruzr.net/sitemap.xml

Note the presence of "sitemap.xml" - and the absence of "sitemap-pages.xml". This blog has no indexable content, in the static pages.

If I wanted to index my static pages- and there are significant differences between pages and posts, that generally makes indexed static pages not so useful - I could add "sitemap-pages.xml", to complement "sitemap.xml".

User-agent: Mediapartners-Google
Disallow: 

User-agent: *
Disallow: /search
Allow: /

Sitemap: http://blogging.nitecruzr.net/sitemap.xml
Sitemap: http://blogging.nitecruzr.net/sitemap-pages.xml

Static pages are not indexed, deliberately - but random indexing will take place.

Static pages are not indexed, deliberately - though there can be some random links that lead to indexing. With blogs, search engines index dynamic content - aka posts, deliberately.

If you publish a website as a Blogger blog, you may want the website indexed - and that is why you might use the pages sitemap.

This blog has no indexable static content.

Besides having no indexable static content, this blog has some non indexable static content. I wrote one article, which is carefully mirrored between a page ("static page") and a complementary post ("dynamic page") - which discusses the differences between pages and posts.

Were both the dynamic and static pages of that specific article to be indexed, in this blog, the search engines might levy a duplicated content penalty. Your blog may differ - and that is why Blogger provides "sitemap-pages.xml", and the option to index static pages.

It's your blog - and your choice to make.

Most blog owners will publish posts (dynamic pages) as blog content, and use static pages sparingly, as static (non indexed) accessories. Blogger, as a default, leaves "sitemap-pages.xml" out of "robots.txt" - but you can add pages, as indexed content, if you wish.