Using the Meta Robots Tag in Blogger - The Meta Robots Tag and Google Blogger Classic Template Tags
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A popular blog publisher such as Google Blogger ( http://www.blogspot.com/ ) does not allow a webmaster to upload a robots.txt file, but allows the template to be customized. This offers opportunities for a webmaster to control which pages of the blog will be indexed, and which will not. Using this ability, the problem of duplicate content issues will be resolved.
The dynamic blog template is driven by Blogger template tags, which can be easily handled in Blogger Classic Template. Below are the common template tags which can be used to customize the meta robots tag <meta name="robots" content="robots-terms">.
Blogger Template Tag | Function |
<MainPage>...</MainPage> | Conditional Tag that will execute the command within, if the page is the main page or the blog front page. |
<ArchivePage>...</ArchivePage> | Conditional Tag that will run the script within, if the page is an archived page. |
<ItemPage>...</ItemPage> | Conditional Tag that will execute the command within if the page is a Post page in Blogger. |
<Blogger>... </Blogger> | Anything that will repeat for each entry in the blog must be contained in these tags. For example, the post pages. |
<$BlogMetaData$> | The default meta tags of Blogger. If you select “No” to “Add my Blog to search engine results,” it will generate “no index,” “no follow” |
Take note that to apply these tags, it is recommended that you switch to the Blogger Classic Template.
Ideally we will want the front page and the item pages crawled. The archive page causes duplicate content. The current default setup of Blogger does not use the meta robots tag; instead, it makes use of <$BlogMetaData$>, which does not offer protection from duplicate content issues.
Below are the lists of the meta robots content that will be used to control the crawling and indexing functions of common search engine bots:
Content Values/Robot Terms | Function |
"index, follow" | Search engine bots such as Googlebot will crawl these pages and will follow the links within them. |
"index, nofollow" | The bots will crawl these pages but will not follow the links within them. |
"noindex, follow" | Search engine bots will not crawl the page but will follow the links within it. But this function seems to be ignored by Google. |
"noindex, nofollow" | The bots can neither crawl nor index the page, and cannot follow the links within it. |
"none" | This will work in the same way as "noindex, nofollow". |
"Noarchive" | The Googlebot will index the page and crawl the links in it, but will not cache the page. |
"NOODP" | The Googlebot will index the page and crawl the links in it, but will not show the description from the Open Directory Project (DMOZ) in the search results |
A combination of the Google Blogger template tags and the Content values of meta robots give any webmaster full control over the crawling and indexing of their blogs hosted in Blogspot.com
Also currently, by default Googlebot or any other search engine will crawl all of the blog pages in blogspot. To avoid duplicate content issues, a tweak of the Classic template will be needed.
Next: Formulating the recommended meta robots tag syntax in Google Blogger >>
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