How (And Why) To No-Index Archive Pages In Blogger

When I checked how many webpages from SpiceUpYourBlog.com were indexed in Google, I was a bit surprised.

We have 741 Blog Posts published so far and I noticed that 2150 webpages were indexed in Google - see screenshot below.

Tip: To see how many of your webpages are indexed in Google, simply type "site:www.yourdomain.com" in Google.

The fact is that whenever a blog post was published, an archive page of the published date had been created as well.

Example:

A few days ago, this post was published: http://www.spiceupyourblog.com/2014/05/7-basic-on-page-seo-elements.html
At the same time, it created this archive page which contains the link to the blog post above: http://www.spiceupyourblog.com/2014_05_27_archive.html

Here are two reasons why this is not optimal:

There is a possibility that your Blog Post will suffer due to duplicate content.
Google may be skeptical and think you're a content farm

Duplicate Content

Two identical webpages = duplicate content.

In case of duplicate content, the webpage that Google discovered second will be punished. So, your chances are like fifty-fifty that your original blog post will not be negatively affected.

Avoid being seen as a Content Farm

To build a high quality blog with a high PageRank, you need quality content. More content is not enough. I would focus on quality. The saying Less is more is true, again.

I am a strong believer that few webpages of high quality is much more effective than many webpages with content of mediocre quality. I think that Google believes this as well because of the following reason:

Google has webpages in their index as heavy as 100 million Gigabytes. The more pages you add to this index, the heavier it gets.

This means that the more webpages you add to Google, the more chances you have that one of your pages rank high. But Google wants quality content only. So, if you help Google by adding quality content to their index only, you will leave him more space in his database. As goodwill, he may do you a favor and rank your webpages higher.

The Simple Code

To prevent Google from indexing all your archive pages, follow these steps:

From your Blogger dashboard, go to "Template") -> "Edit HTML"
It is always recommended to backup your template before you make any changes in your code. -> click “Backup / Restore”, then click "Download full template".
Add the code below after the <head> tag. It's just a three liner!

<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "archive"'>
<meta content='noindex' name='robots'/>
</b:if>

To make sure that the tag is been added successfully on your pages, go to an archive page and open the source code. Check if you find the following code: <meta content='noindex' name='robots'/>

Now, you can sit back and let Google and other search engine crawlers do their work. It will take a while until all your indexed archive sites will be removed from the index. Once your webpages are removed, you can expect better SEO results.

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