Sunday, January 30, 2005

In order for Google to properly index a blog, you need the search engine to link to the individual post pages, not to the front page, which changes every time someone blogs.

To prevent Google from archiving the front page, you need a META tag that says NOINDEX, FOLLOW, NOARCHIVE, that is: don't index this page's contents, follow its links, don't archive its contents (which are going to change). Then the individual post pages need a META tag that says INDEX, FOLLOW, ARCHIVE, that is, do index the contents, follow the links, and do archive the contents.

However I don't see where on Blogger you can generate a different HEAD section for the page and the pages. The code lives in the BODY section. I doubt META tags even work in the BODY section.

Does anyone know the answer to this mystery?

7:48 PM

1 Comments:

First off, you mean, NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW...

The Gogglebot is pretty clever. It can figure out the directory structure of virtually any valid web-enabled offering and often goes deeper than many people expect. To wit: http://johnny.ihackstuff.com
Johnny specializes in finding Googlized info no one would ever expect to be indexed.

So, allowing Google to index and cache your entire blog from the front page will typically give the expected results, especially if you archive frequently (weekly or even daily). If you have "post pages" enabled, Google will serve those up as appropriate.

So, it's like Candide's tutor loved to say, "All is for the best in this, the best of all possible worlds."

By  David C. Daniel, at 11:58 PM  

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