Monday, January 29, 2007

Blogspot hint: Google optimization

I just implemented this little optimization of the blog in the hope that it'll improve Google's search results. The problem I noticed that if you find this blog through a search on google, you'll quite often get a link to the front page (allantech.blogspot.com/index.html) in your search results because a related article was on the front page at the time when google indexed the site. However with the current update rate it's also quite likely that when you click that link, the article is removed from the front page already. An example: today I searched for "AllanZip" and this is the result I got:Notice how you are directed to the front page instead of the article page.
The way to avoid this is to put a robots meta-tag on the front page, instructing google to "noindex,follow" meaning "don't index this page but follow the links" - however this shouldn't be put on the item pages. Since BlogSpot uses the same template for both the main page and the item pages, this took a little bit of research, but finally I got this code to do the trick:


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


I hope this little trick will improve the search results - let's see when Googlebot will honor me with yet another visit :-)

No comments: