Showing posts with label Blogger. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Blogger. Show all posts

Monday, October 15, 2018

Customizing your Blogger title to improve SEO

How to use this simple tip and make your blog have more visibility.

Last week we discussed how to prevent archived pages from being indexed by crawlers. On this post we will discuss another nice improvement that we can add to our site: how to customize the tile of your page if you're using Blogger.

Changing Theme Settings

In order to do that, we will have to edit the html for our blog. As mentioned in the previous post, to edit our html, inside Blogger, we click Theme -> customize button:


Once the html opens, just at the beginning we can find the <tilte> tag. I replaced mine by:



Modified Template

After making this change, this is the expected logic:
  • if the page is an archive page (myblog/2018/05), show the blog title and add a noindex to the page so it won't show up in search results
  • else if the landing page, only show blog title
  • if it's a post page, then show the post title.

And this is my final source:
<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "archive"'>
<meta content='NOINDEX' name='ROBOTS'/>
<title><data:blog.title/></title>
<b:elseif cond='data:blog.pageType == "index"'/>
<title><data:blog.title/></title>
<b:else/>
<title><data:blog.pageName/></title>
</b:if>

Conclusion

There are many customizations that we can done to our pages. For more information check Blogger Help. Links specific to this post are referenced below.

See Also

For more posts like this, please click here.

References

Blogger Help - Widget Tags for Layouts
Blogger Help - Layouts Data Tags

Monday, October 8, 2018

Removing Blogger archives from Google to improve your SEO


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:
  1. open the Management Dashboard by: "Design"  (or "Layout") -> "Edit HTML"
  2. Backup your template by clicking "Download Full Template"
  3. Add the following three lines this just after <head> tag:
<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == &quot;archive&quot;'>
     <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 SEO

For more posts like this, please click this link.

References

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93710

About the Author

Bruno Hildenbrand      
Principal Architect, HildenCo Solutions.