Optimizing Crawlers and Indexing Settings: A Guide for Your Blogger Blog

Crawlers and indexing settings for Blogger

If you want to drive more traffic to your Blogger blog, it is important to ensure that your content is effectively crawled by search engines and properly indexed. In this post, we'll discuss what crawling and indexing are, and explore the best settings to make sure your blog posts get the attention they deserve.

What is Crawling?

Crawling is the process by which search engine bots (or spiders) scan through every page of your website to determine its relevance and content. This activity helps search engines understand how to index your site pages so that they can be easily located by users who are searching for related information.

What is Indexing?

After a bot has crawled through every page on your website, it indexes them based on factors such as content quality, backlinks quality & quantity, site speed & performance, and internal links structure, etc., This activity makes sure that when users conduct relevant searches google shows just those top-quality results from most authentic websites only!

Here are some tips to make sure all your pages are indexed correctly:

1. Use relevant keywords: Use keyword-rich content in your blog posts so that search engines can better understand the topics you are covering. But be sure to do so in moderation, as overusing keywords can result in penalties.

2. Strategic internal linking: Linking to other internal pages within your blog gives users a path to discover more of your content while showing search engines credible information and content structure which eventually leads to higher ranking & better SEO.

3. Remove Duplicates: Duplicate content is a big no-no for Google. Make sure that your Blogger template doesn't create duplicate versions of any post page - this can happen when multiple URLs lead to the same page on your site.

Custom Robots.txt for Your Blogger Blog

In addition to optimizing your blog content, you can also improve your Blogger blog's search engine rankings by controlling crawlers' access using a robots.txt file.

What is Robots.txt?

Robots.txt is a text file that is placed on your website's root directory to control the crawling of search engine bots. The file gives instructions to web spiders to crawler URLs and directories that these bots have been allowed or forbidden from accessing.

Creating and Editing the File

The robots.txt file is created in the blogging platform's dashboard. In this case, we will focus on how to create it on Blogger. To create or edit a custom robots.txt file:

1. Sign in to your blogger account

2. From the Dashboard, go to Settings then Search Preferences.

3. Click on the Edit link beside the Custom robots.txt option under Crawlers and Indexing.

4. Select Yes if you want bots to be able to crawl any page they find links pointing at on-site – No if you want bots not to crawl deeper than your home page.

5. Next, add specific instructions for particular search engines attempting entry such as disallowing indexing of some pages/directories on the blog.

6. Save your settings.

Here's an example of a custom robots.txt code for a Blogger blog:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /search

Allow: /

Sitemap: https://example.com/sitemap.xml

This code instructs crawlers not to index the search page (/search) but allows them to access all other pages on the site. The Sitemap line tells crawlers where to find your website's XML sitemap, which helps them to better crawl and index your content.

To use this code, replace "example.com" with your own blog's domain name and upload it to the root directory of your blog via a file manager or FTP client. After uploading, test the code using a robots.txt tester tool to ensure it has been implemented correctly.

This is just one example of how you can customize robots.txt for your Blogger blog – there are many options available depending on your needs and goals. It's important to research and consider best practices before making any changes to avoid negatively impacting your SEO efforts.

Custom Robot Header Tags are directives that communicate with search engine crawlers to help them understand how they should crawl and index your website. By enabling these tags, you can control what information the crawlers see and how they store it in their database.

Here's how you can enable Custom Robot Header Tags on your Blogger blog:

1. Log in to your Blogger account and go to the "Settings" tab.

2. Click on "Search preferences" from the left-hand sidebar.

3. Under "Crawlers and indexing," find the "Custom robots header tags" section and click on "Edit."

4. Enable the feature by selecting "Yes."

5. You will now see different options for customizing the tags for your homepage, archive pages, search pages, and individual posts/pages.

Let's take a closer look at each of these options:

1. Homepage: This allows you to set rules for how search engines should treat your homepage. For example, you can choose to allow or disallow crawling of specific sections of your homepage or prevent certain pages from being indexed.

2. Archive Pages: These tags apply to category and tag pages on your blog. Here you can control whether or not these pages should be indexed by search engines.

3. Search Pages: If you have a search bar on your blog, then this option applies to those result pages. You may want to disallow crawling of these pages as they often generate duplicate content issues.

4. Post and Pages: This is where things get interesting because that’s what basically we post on our blogs most of the time – posts! With this tag, you can add a noindex,follow directive for specific posts or categories.

By customizing these tags according to your preferences, you give crawlers clear instructions on what content they should prioritize, protect sensitive information, reduce duplicate content issues, improve page load speed, increase visibility in search results as well as optimize your site's overall SEO strategy. With just a few simple changes, you can significantly improve the indexing and crawling of your Blogger blog.

Here's an example of custom robot header tags for a homepage of a Blogger blog:

```html

```

In this example, we have set the following directives:

- The page should not be indexed or followed (`noindex,nofollow`)

- The maximum image preview is set to large for Google search (`max-image-preview:large`)

- The maximum snippet length is set to unlimited (`max-snippet:-1`)

- Video previews are disabled for Google search results (`max-video-preview:-1`)

- We don't want the page to appear in the cached version of Google ('noarchive').

You can adjust these settings based on your preferences.

Here's an example of custom robot header tags for archive and search pages of a Blogger blog:

```HTML

```

This code will allow search engine crawlers to crawl the archive and search pages but it won't index them. This is useful because these pages usually don't provide much unique content, so indexing them can dilute the relevance of your website in search results.

Here's an example of custom robot header tags for individual posts and pages of a Blogger blog:

```HTML

```

To explain each tag:

- `<meta content='index,follow' name='robots'/>` - This indicates that the post/page should be indexed by search engines and its links can be followed.

- `<meta content='max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1' name='googlebot'/>` - This sets the maximum length of snippet or description to be shown in Google search results, as well as specifies whether images or videos can be displayed. With this setting (-1), it allows Googlebot to determine the length dynamically based on the query.

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