If you're using Blogger like me to host your blog and tried to add your blog to google adding Google Search Console, you may have realized that by default, Blogger does not block Google from indexing your archived pages.
Potential problems are:
- users won't find the content they are looking for
- users will probably not click on your impressions
- your site will be ranked low due to poor or duplicated results
- some of your pages may even be banned
So how do we fix that?
Implementing noindex
According to Google:
You can prevent a page from appearing in Google Search by including a noindex
meta tag in the page's HTML code, or by returning a 'noindex' header in
the HTTP request. When Googlebot next crawls that page and see the tag
or header, Googlebot will drop that page entirely from Google Search
results, regardless of whether other sites link to it.
So, there are two ways to implement noindex: as a meta tag and as an HTTP response header. Using Blogger, the simplest is to make use of the meta <meta content='NOINDEX' name='ROBOTS'/>.Let's take a look.
Editing the Template
To fix Blogger, you need to edit your html template by, in Blogger:- open the Management Dashboard by: "Design" (or "Layout") -> "Edit HTML"
- Backup your template by clicking "Download Full Template"
- Add the following three lines this just after <head> tag:
<meta content='NOINDEX' name='ROBOTS'/>
</b:if>
And save. Now your template should then look like:
What's next?
Now just let Google and other search engines do their work. After a couple of weeks you should see that your archives disappeared from the search and your results are way clearer and concise giving users access to what they are looking for and hopefully increasing your engagement.See Also
Customizing your Blogger title to improve SEOFor more posts like this, please click this link.