Right now we are going to learn about Noindex and how it works. Search engines are taking actions to avoid content duplication.
Speaking of content duplication, archives and category do not contain contents of their own; they take content from post indexed by search engines, thereby duplicating their contents.
So, we place Noindex tags on categories, search page, archive and paginated posts to avoid duplicating contents. You may wish to ask:
How is this achieved? Well, I will show you a step-by-step process on how to Noindex label, tag or categories, search page, archive page and paginated posts in this tutorial. Now let’s get into it.
BLOGGER. How to No index:
Labels. To Noindex your label, follow the outlined steps:
*Login to Blogger dashboard
*Click on Settings
*After that you should click on Search Preference section
*Then you enable Custom robot.txt
*Finally, copy paste the code below at Custom robot.txt section
Ensure you paste the code correctly so that you do not generate errors from the entire process while indexing your blog.
Archives: Follow the steps below to Noindex it.
Login to your Blogger account
Go to Dashboard > Design >Edit HTML
Locate the tag and add the following code below it:
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Now go to Webmaster >> search appearance and check if archive has caused the duplicate content or not. If you carefully do it, you will notice that it has not.
Paginated posts: Follow the steps below to Noindex it
*Login to the blogger dashboard
*Go to Settings >> search preferences
*Go down to crawlers and indexing
*Click on edit button next to Custom robots header tags and choose yes
*Put a check on Noindex under archive search pages and save the changes.
*Edit the post you wish to place Noindex on
*Lastly, click on custom robots tag and place your Noindex appropriately
After the last stage then it is done, but you have to uncheck the default option first before carrying out the last step.
ON WORDPRESS
I have written a similar article on this on infoguidenigeria.com. So, just search for how to rel_noindex tag on certain pages/posts on your blog.
To achieve a similar result in WordPress, you have to download and install the plugin. With it you can no_index any post, page, archive, and categories you wish to. Read my previous article from the link provided above for a better understanding.
CONCLUSION
How to Noindex label, tag or categories, search page, archive page and paginated posts is a concise procedure on how to carefully apply Noindex tags on Blogger and WordPress blogs. The Noindex tag of a robots Meta tag requests that are automated bots that avoid indexing a web page. This is done on pages you wish to keep the contents private and to avoid content duplication. Caution should be taken when applying Noindex especially in Blogger blog because of the codes involved. A mistake made in getting the codes right will not give the required result.