Optimizing your Blogger blog for Search Engines is far more difficult as compared to WordPress blogs as everything has to be done manually since Blogger platform doesn't support plugins. Though Blogger platform belongs to Google, but still there are many issues that must be addressed. One such issue is, how to prevent indexing of Archive Pages?
Archive Pages contain all the posts published in a specific month. For example - August, 2014 archive page will contain all the posts published in the month of August, 2014. From SEO point of view archive pages result in duplicate content as the same content is published on two different places which are post page and archive page.
Also, users hate archive pages. Think of a situation in which you are desperately searching for something and when a links seems to be the one you were searching for - you land an archive page and you had to analyse or search through the entire page to find that article. You would hate that site, won't you?
Hence, we must prevent these archive pages from getting indexed in search engines. This will be good for SEO and user experience.
You can block archive pages from indexing in two ways, but i will suggest you to use both the ways.
Block Indexing on Archive Pages
1. Search Preference Setting
Blogger platform was evolved a lot in the past few years, providing a range of new features especially related to search preferences. You can use this Search Preference option in Settings to make your blog more Search Engine friendly.
- Go to Settings > Search Preferences
- Enable Custom robots header tags
- In the Archive and Search pages segment select NOINDEX and NOARCHIVE.
2. Manually Adding Meta Tags
This method involves manually adding adding NOINDEX meta robots tags to the archive pages by editing your template.
- Go to Template > Edit HTML.
- Search for <head> and paste the following code after <head>
- Click SAVE TEMPLATE.
<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "archive"'> <meta content='NOINDEX' name='ROBOTS'/> </b:if>
Most blog posts that I have read concerning the non indexing of archive pages seem to over run the easy method which you mentioned on step 1 using blogger dashboard. I will quickly implement it on www.tokohow.com Thanks for the tips.
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