2 Ways to Prevent Indexing of Blogger Archive and Search Pages

Blogger archive pages are of different types and can be a source of content duplication if you're publishing articles as a whole instead of excerpts on these pages. By default, the indexing of these pages is turned on. Some of the blog owners prefer indexing of these pages while others do not. I do not prefer the indexing of these pages. All I want is the homepage, the static pages, and of course simple post pages in the search engine database. And, for that, I've blocked the indexing of both the search and archive pages on this blog. If you want the same, you can too do it in two different ways. The first way is dead simple while the other one requires some code fiddling. We'll take a look at both these methods. When I blocked my archive pages in the past, the first method was not available at that time. Nowadays, the dashboard has been updated with many useful options. And, preventing indexing of select pages is one of the available options. You can apply these settings on the live blog as it won't hinder traffic at all.

Make sure you understand what exactly you're doing. If you're not sure, it's better to leave the default settings as it is. Your traffic may deviate a bit in the coming weeks after applying these settings.

Read Also:
How to Insert Custom Code Within Blogger Archive Pages

At a later date, if you don't want these settings, you can easily undo them regardless of the method used in the beginning. Let's get started and block indexing of our search and archive pages on Blogger.

Blocking Through the Dashboard Settings

As mentioned before, the first method is quite easy and each one of us can do it in a few easy steps. To do so, go to the Settings → Crawling and indexing section. Here, by default, the option to customize the meta tags is disabled.

Enable this option as shown in the image above. Thereafter, click on the Archive and search page tags option to open the tag customization window prompt.

Here, enable the noindex and nofollow options to ensure the indexing is blocked for the search engines. Though the nofollow is optional, I'll recommend using it as both these options go hand-in-hand. Now, these archive pages will not be indexed by the crawlers.

Blocking Through Template Code

The second method was much popular in those days when these handy dashboard options were not available. Make sure you take a backup of your Blogger template before attempting direct editing.

Now, go to the Theme → CUSTOMIZE → Edit HTML option to open the template's code editor.

<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "archive"'>
    <meta content='noindex,noarchive' name='robots'/>
</b:if>

Within the template code, paste the code shown above right before the </head> tag. And, that's it!

Ideally, you should paste this code much above the closing head tag where title and description meta tags are present. If you can do that, make sure to shift this code snippet much higher in the head.