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Wednesday, March 07, 2007

Important Notice to Blogger Blog Owners

Amazingly, I only recently found out that in transitioning from the old to new Blogger versions, Google was nice enough to add something to my blog:
meta name="ROBOTS" content="NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW"

This tells the search engine spiders to ignore your page. So, no search engine traffic and Google's blog search didn't work for me.

And it isn't just me. It appears that lots of blogs have this. Looking just in my Favorite eLearning Blogs: Big Dog, Little Dog is also afflicted by this same problem.

To get rid of it, I edited my template and removed the:
<$BlogMetaData$>

Nice of them to do this for me. I really didn't want search engines finding my content. :)

6 comments:

bschlenker said...

Hi Tony! Are we losing any functionality by deleting that blogmetadata tag?
I had it too and so I removed it on mine as well.
Thanks!

Donald Clark said...

This makes one wonder why a search company like Google, who takes great pride in having one of the best search engines, would automatically place a tag on pages that excludes them from being searched.

They have also created a spot on the page when you are creating posts that allows you to place key words in your post. Do these key words get indexed if you leave the meta tag in? That is, do the key words override the meta tag?

And thanks for adding me to your list!

Anonymous said...

Before you remove the Google code, you should look at the source of your pages and copy all the metadata that the tag inserts automatically.

Then remove the tag from your template, and look at the source again. You will need to replace all the items that are missing other than the nofollow noindex instruction.

ValEqHK said...

Hi Tony,
I'm just about to begin my blogging journey and was considering Blogger - I really enjoy your blog. So, do the new Blogger accounts all have the same problem, and is there any other blog system out there which is more attractive to search engines? 'Cos for sure, I won't be able to do what you guys are suggesting.

Tony Karrer said...

Valerie - actually I believe that this only affects people who upgraded from Old Blogger to New Blogger. New Blogger accounts from scratch shouldn't be a problem.

Anonymous said...

Of course, people may want to keep the spiders away -- but your point is a good one.

It's the equivalent of having wireless routers broadcast their names (SSIDs) and use "admin/admin" as the administrative ID and password: the kind of thing you want to know about, so you can decide.