The robots header tags allow you to control how your website should display in search results. You can apply robots tags using meta tags and X-robots tags in the response header. Blogger allows you to set both types of robots tag. In this article, we will understand the best practice of custom Robots Header tags to boost the SEO of the Blogger website.
Recently, Blogger made many changes in its interface to improve the user experience. From the SEO point of view, the major update was on new themes. Blogger now supports HTML5 themes that drastically boost the SEO of the webpage. But along with the theme and content, you need to configure the X-Robots-Tag setting properly.
What is X-Robots-Tag or Robots Header tag?
These tags represent your website to search engines like Google, Bing, Yandex, etc. When the search engine bot crawls a website, the X-Robots-Tags or meta tags specify page-level settings by including HTTP header response or meta tag on HTML pages.
| Directive | Meaning |
|---|---|
| all | There are no restrictions for indexing or serving. Note: this directive is the default value and does not affect if explicitly listed. |
| noindex | Do not show this page in search results. |
| nofollow | Do not follow the links on this page. |
| none | Equivalent to noindex, nofollow. |
| noarchive | Do not show a “Cached” link in search results. You have to specify this directive. Otherwise, Google may generate a cached page, and users may access it through the search results. |
| nosnippet | Do not show a text snippet or video preview snippet in the search results for this page. |
| noodp | Do not use metadata from the Open Directory Project for titles or snippets shown for this page. This tag is no longer supported. |
| notranslate | Do not offer translation of this page in search results. |
| noimageindex | Images on the page will not index. |
| unavailable_after: [RFC-850 date/time] | Do not show this page in search results after the specified date/time. The date/time must be specified in the format including, but not limited to, RFC 822, RFC 850, and ISO 8601. By default, there is no expiration date for content. This tag should be used for content that shouldn’t be visible after a certain date or time. |
NOODP Robots Header tag is no longer supported.
We talked about the custom robots header tags available with Blogger. Many websites and YouTube channel guides regarding the robots header tags for the Blogger blog suggest enabling robots header tags noodp for the pages and posts. But that is an entirely wrong practice, then what is right?
Search engines like Google no longer support the noodp tag. So don’t follow the wrong practice. It may spoil the On-Page SEO. I hope that Blogger will soon remove this option from its settings.
Who should enable custom robots header tags in the Blogger blog?
Before making any changes in the Blogger blog settings, we’ve to understand who should enable this custom robots header tag setting and who should not.
Who shouldn’t enable this tag option
- If you’re running a simple blog, then no need to enable this feature: This feature allows you to customize the index of posts or pages of the Blogger blog. In case you want to improve the SEO of the Blogger website, then you can use
- robots.txt and robots meta tags combination,
- add meta tags to the Blogger Theme,
- write SEO-friendly content to the Blogger blog.
Read the complete article to understand implementation if you want to enable custom robots header tags for Blogger.
Who should enable and use these tags?
- You don’t want to customization of indexing of pages,
- some pages should be indexed,
- images of some pages not to index,
- content available on the website is not suitable after a specific date or time,
- If you don’t want to allow translation on some pages,
- Don’t allow indexing some pages in the search results.
How to enable custom robots header tags?
Log in to the Blogger dashboard to enable these X-robots header tags.
- Open the settings of the blog,
- Scroll to crawlers and indexing option,
- Switch on the “Enable custom robots header tags” option,
- Home page tags: Click on this, and the option shown in the above image will appear. You’ve to click on all, and save the settings,
- Archive and search page tags: from the options provided above, you’ve to select noindex.
- Posts and Pages type: To index all the pages, you’ve to click on enable “all”. And then save the settings.
As we already discussed, there is no need to enable the noodp tag.
Enabling custom robots header tags will allow you to set custom header tags for every page and post. So you can decide on the suitable robots header tags.
The above image displays the settings of the Blogger blog post. As you can see, now there is an option available for custom robots tags available in the post’s sidebar.
If you enabled custom robots header settings for the simple blog, leave all these settings.
You can also check the HTTP response of the webpage to check all the settings.
Final Words
In this article, we understood the best practice of custom robots header tags for the Blogger blog. What should we choose, and what should we ignore? The best approach, in this case, is don’t touch this setting and make changes in the Robots meta tag of the blog.
I hope you liked this article. In case of any doubt, query, or feedback, comment in the comment section provided below. Thank You!
Thank you sir ! For explaining Very helpful
thankyou so much for this information i really appreciate your efforts to educate us thankyou once again , i will be visiting often .
Thanks for the detailed explanation
Hi @Ashok, I’m very much thankful to you. I’m also a continuous reader of seoneurons, especially for the blogger SEO.
Very Helpful I was getting rejection when I request for indexing but after reading and following it is going through i hope my website appears for google search after the request
Very Helpful I was getting rejection when I request for indexing but after reading and following it is going through i hope my website appears for google search after the request
Thank you. You described this very clearly.
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best tags for blogger
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