How to set custom robots header tag for blogspot blog

Before we proceed, it will be wise enough to know what robots header tags are and why they are necessary for a blog. Robot header tags are those headers which are meant for consumption by robots that is to say, it is only visible to search engine’s bots. If you are reading this post it means you are a blogger and already know what bots are because all bloggers normally cry about having their blogs indexed by google bots at one point or the other. now setting a custom robots header will definitely increase your on-page SEO without doubt.

To add a custom robots header  to your blogger blog, simply navigate to settings>search preferences you’ll see ‘custom robots header’ which is disabled by default, change it to yes and you’ll be given options to tick, set it to your desire and hit the save button. But wait a minute, a little bit of mistake could ruin your blog’s SEO so it is important to know what the options there mean and not just tick anyhow, see explanations below:

Here, the pages are categorized into home page, archive and search pages and pages & posts’ pages

• Home Page – This category includes a single page, the home page of your blog.
• Archive and Search pages – Archive pages are those which list multiple blog posts (or snippets) on a single web page. These are the page accessed by clicking the ‘Older’and ‘Newer’ links at the bottom of the home page and all pages reached by clicking these links, or the pages accessed by clicking the Year or Month links in the blog archives.
  Search pages are those which open on searching in a blogger blog. These pages also show multiple blog posts on a single page.
• Pages and Posts – These are the blog post pages or standalone blogger pages. These pages show only a single blog post and the associated comments.

The different robot header tags allowed are all, noindex, nofollow, none, noarchive, nosnippet, noodp, notranslate, noimageindex and unavailable_after. all – No restrictions are placed on the robots. They are allowed to crawl, index and serve content

·         noindex – The page shouldn’t be indexed i.e. it shouldn’t be shown in search results.

• nofollow – All links on the page containing this directive will be treated as nofollow. The page will be indexed but the linked pages will not be crawled. Note that if there is another web page somewhere on the internet having links to those pages marked as nofollow by you, then those pages will be crawled. The nofollow directive simply states that ‘Do not index the linked pages because I have linked to them. But, if someone else has linked to them and has not marked them as nofollow, then you are free to index them’.
• none – none is the combination of noindex and nofollow.
• noarchive - Google caches certain web pages and shows a link to the cached pages in search results. If noarchive tag is specified, then the cached link will not be shown in search results.
• nosnippet – Along with links to webpages, Google search results also shows a text snippet to give the searcher an idea of the contents of that page. If nosnippet is set, then text snippets will not be shown for that page in search results.
• noodp – The Open Directory Project (dmoz.org) is a human created directory of websites and webpages. The human editors also add descriptions for these webpages. Sometimes, Google uses these descriptions (and other information) to improve the text snippets or other information shown in search results. If the noodp tag is set, Google will not use metadata from ODP.
• notranslate – If the language of the user is different from the language of the webpage, Google shows a link in its search results for translating that page. If notranslate is set, then such links won’t be shown.
• noimageindex – If set, the images on that page will not be indexed. This is similar to nofollow tag. If the same image is present on some other page, then that image may be indexed.
• unavailable_after – The webpage will not be shown in search results after the specified date and time
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Having explained these, you can now make a your settings as to how you desire, but if you are new to blogging and still don’t understand most of those context the follow my own as shown in the screen shot below.
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Save your settings and that’s it