Description: An easy way to add custom robots header tags using X-Robots-Tag in Blogger. Make your Blogger header tags SEO friendly.
Why do you need to add custom robots header tags into your blog? I think you knew it already because you are reading this post. Let us repeat it again. The content on your blog you don't want to share with major search engines can be restricted by the robots header tags. You can also restrict them to index by the custom robots.txt file in Blogger. On the static pages, you can easily add a meta robots tag with the value 'noindex' to the pages you don't want to share with search engines under header section of your website. If you are using Blogger, bang! You don't need to go for the Blogger source section to add robots header tags because Blogger has recently updated its dashboard with the search preferences setting in which you can easily add or remove your robots header tags for different types of pages such as post, homepage, search or archive pages. You just need some clicks, and your header tags will be automatically updated.
You can find many options in your custom robots header tags under your Blogger settings, but you may enable this setting only if you know what are you doing. Custom header tags are all about crawling and indexing your Blogger blogs so a single mistake in your custom header tags section can remove your entire traffic from the search engines. That is why I have decided to write a post with optimized settings in custom robots header tags to increase the search traffic for your blog.
Before setting up your custom robots header tags, let we explain all the options of header tags. Once you understand the options you can correctly set up your header tags as per your need.
Recommended: Custom Static Page URL in Blogger
Login to your Blogger dashboard -> Select your blog -> Settings -> Search preferences -> Edit (under custom robots header tags) -> Now, click "yes" to enable this option.
Now, select the options as per the screenshot into your header tags, and finally click on "Save changes".
You have done!
Creating header tags using this method you would not find any index robots tag into "view source code" since these are no meta tags while these are X-Robots-Tag that executes in HTTP response.
To view the X-Robots-Tag, open this link, and paste the desire URL (i.e., your archive link), and click on submit. Scroll down the page until you see"Header returns from ...." you will see X-Robots-Tag here.
If you have enabled this option, you will see custom header tags settings in your post editor with the default value that you are using here. You may change the setting to particular post direct from the post editor.
Recommended: How to Add Meta description using Post Editor
Conclusion: Blogger team is continuously working hard to make Blogger SEO friendly. We should use custom robots header tags to handle the crawling and indexing for the different section of Blogger. You may tell us about this feature via comment.
You can find many options in your custom robots header tags under your Blogger settings, but you may enable this setting only if you know what are you doing. Custom header tags are all about crawling and indexing your Blogger blogs so a single mistake in your custom header tags section can remove your entire traffic from the search engines. That is why I have decided to write a post with optimized settings in custom robots header tags to increase the search traffic for your blog.
Before setting up your custom robots header tags, let we explain all the options of header tags. Once you understand the options you can correctly set up your header tags as per your need.
Recommended: Custom Static Page URL in Blogger
What are Custom Robots Header Tags in Blogger?
Inside Blogger settings under custom robots header tags, you will have the following options that I will describe here.- All: If you have selected this option for a page into your Blogger, it means there is no restrictions to robots for crawling and indexing to that page. This is also a default value for all pages and posts inside your Blogger, if you don't have enabled this option.
- Noindex: This is what we want to use custom header tags, but a mistake to choose this option can vanish your blog from the search engines. If you choose "noindex" to any page in your Blogger then then the robots can not crawl and index that page. It means you would not see this page into search engines.
- Nofollow: Let you have a post that contains internal and external links. By default, Google crawler will follow each links inside your posts and consider for rankings. If you don't wish to follow your link on a particular page or post, simply add nofollow robot meta tag on that page or choose this option in your Blogger.
- None: It means you are selecting both "noindex" and "nofollow".
- noarchive: Choosing this option will remove "cached" link from the search.
- nosnippet: It will remove the snippet (meta description) from the search result pages.
- noodp: Selecting this option will remove the meta data (title or snippet) from open directory projects like DMOZ.
- notranslate: It will tell to spiders not to offer translate into search engines pages.
- noimageindex: If this option selected, your post will remain in the search results but the images on that page will not show up in the search.
- unavailable_after: You also have an option to noindex a page after a specific time.
SEO friendly Custom Robots Header Tags Settings in Blogger
Just follow the simple steps to make your custom robots header tags completely SEO friendly.Login to your Blogger dashboard -> Select your blog -> Settings -> Search preferences -> Edit (under custom robots header tags) -> Now, click "yes" to enable this option.
Now, select the options as per the screenshot into your header tags, and finally click on "Save changes".
You have done!
Creating header tags using this method you would not find any index robots tag into "view source code" since these are no meta tags while these are X-Robots-Tag that executes in HTTP response.
To view the X-Robots-Tag, open this link, and paste the desire URL (i.e., your archive link), and click on submit. Scroll down the page until you see"Header returns from ...." you will see X-Robots-Tag here.
If you have enabled this option, you will see custom header tags settings in your post editor with the default value that you are using here. You may change the setting to particular post direct from the post editor.
Recommended: How to Add Meta description using Post Editor
Conclusion: Blogger team is continuously working hard to make Blogger SEO friendly. We should use custom robots header tags to handle the crawling and indexing for the different section of Blogger. You may tell us about this feature via comment.
