From time to time you will come across a blogger who wants to prevent their Blogspot blog from appearing on search engines. Under the “listing’ and ‘let search engines find your blog’ settings in Blogger they have chosen no for both of the following:
“Add your blog to our listings” and “Let search engines find your blog”, yet still their blog can be found listed on Google.
Normally to prevent your blog from being indexed you would use a robot.tx file to block Googlebot from crawling your blog.
Blogger users cannot upload a robots.txt file to prevent Google bot from crawling their site.
Instead, they can use the robots meta tag to exclude their blog from being listed in Google’s search results.
If you wish to have your blog excluded from Google’s results, simply add the following to your template right after the <head> tag.
Click on Layout- Edit Html and look for the section that says <head>. (Before editing your template, you may want to save a copy of it.)
Paste the following code right after the <head>.
<meta name=”googlebot” content=”noindex”>
To prevent all robots from indexing your blog, you’d use this code.
<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex nofollow”>
Once you’ve done this, save your changes.
It may take a while before your blog is no longer listed in Google’s index.
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5 responses so far ↓
Wrote: Sep 1, 2008 at 11:32 pm
I wonder why some blog owners want to prevent google from indexing. they dont want traffic?
Wrote: Sep 5, 2008 at 9:40 am
Nuts, no one else asked, so I guess I will: why would someone want Googlebots NOT to go to their site? Maybe there’s an obvious reason but it’s lost on me.
Wrote: Sep 24, 2008 at 1:04 am
We have a private blog that we use as a journal to keep in contact with friends – we’d like it private without indexing. I followed your instructions and I get the error: “Your template could not be parsed as it is not well-formed. Please make sure all XML elements are closed properly.
XML error message: Open quote is expected for attribute “{1}” associated with an element type “name”.”
Please update with correct code. Many of my friends would be interested in this!
Wrote: Oct 25, 2008 at 1:15 am
@mm
As Kristine gave an example of ‘Private Blog’ . Similarly, if you have a test blog, then obviously you will never want it to be indexed.
Wrote: Oct 28, 2008 at 8:46 am
Another reason is that the blog contents might be showing up somewhere else (such as through an RSS feed on the site) and they might not want it indexed twice?
Thanks for this article.