How to Set up Custom Robots Header Tags on Blogger

Don’t you know there are search robots? They are responsible for recognising the updates on our sites and notifying the search engines about the same.

With the help of proper predefined tags, you can communicate with the crawlers to increase and decrease the search visibility. That’s what exactly you are going to read in this post.

How to Set up Custom Robots Header Tags on Blogger?

I hope you are a Blogger user looking forward to increasing your search engine exposure so that the organic traffic will reach a zenith.

If so, I recommend following this guide and enabling the custom robots header tags for maximum search engine visibility (especially for new blogs).

Before getting to know the process of setting up custom robots header tags on Blogger, you should know what they are.

Custom Robots Header Tags and Purpose

In Blogger, you are going to deal with the following custom robots header tags.

1. all – If you set this tag, crawlers are not bound by any constraints. They can freely crawl, index and expose your content .

2. noindex – Not all the blogs are for public notice. Even if you don’t share the URL of your personal blog with anybody, chances are people will come to it from search results. On such a scenario, you can use noindex tag as it prevents search engines from indexing the pages.

3. nofollow – Nofollow and dofollow tags are for outbound links. Dofollow is the default robot tag for all your outbound links. That means the search engines can sneak upon the pages you linked to. If you don’t want search bots to look through your links, addition of a nofollow tag must help you.

4. none – none combines the features of both noindex and nofollow tags. The crawlers will neither index your pages nor skim through the links.

5. noarchive – You might have noticed a cached label with most of the website links on SERPs. It shows that Google has captured a copy of your site into their server to display in case it goes down. That being said, the noarchive tag turns off cached version in search pages.

6. nosnippet – The text snippets in search results help people find what’s on the webpage. If you want to keep the content exclusive, you can turn this header tag on.

7. noodp – Open Directory Project or Dmoz is a man-made directory of websites. Google uses the information from there sometimes. You can turn it off with this tag if you want to.

8. notranslate – Do you want to disable translation on your site? Then use notranslate for the exact purpose.

9. noimageindex – If you allow Google to index your images, people may steal it and use on their own websites. To prevent that, you can keep the images deindexed using noimageindex tag. Also Read this Image SEO guide .

10. unavailable_after – In Blogger, you will get a field right to this tag. So, the webpage will be deindexed after this time.

With that being said, let’s get into the real meat of this post.

How to Setup Custom Robots Header Tags?

As you know, we are talking about setting up robots tags on blogger. Follow the steps given below to proceed with this.

Step 1 : Visit blogger.com and sign in to your account. From the list of your blogs, choose the one for which you want to modify robots tags.

Step 2 : Then go to Settings >> Search preference. There you can see a setting called Custom robots header tags under Crawlers and Indexing. Click the Edit link to the right of it.

Step 3 : At this step, you will notice two radio buttons. Obviously, the first one should be your pick.

Step 4 : Now, you will get a set of checkboxes. But don’t get intimidated! It may feel like a complicated one, but it’s not. You can set them on your own by reading the “Custom Robots Header Tags and Purpose” once again. Or, just follow the same settings I chose (refer to the image given below) and hit Save changes.

Note: We can set this up for the homepage, archive pages, and post pages as well.

Hurray! You have done this.

Bottom Line

Trust me custom robots header tags are powerful! As Google provides a readymade setup to use them, why don’t you go for it?

And, don’t tick noindex checkbox until and unless you are sure about it because doing the same will pull your website off from search engine result pages (SERPs).

Let me know if anything bothers you regarding this topic through the comment form down below.