How To Setup Search Preferences In Blogger ?

Blogger provides various features for effective blogging and one of its feature is search preferences. With the help of this feature you can better optimize your blog for search engines. Blogger offers various options in search preferences such as:

• Meta tags
• Errors and re-directions
• Crawlers and indexing

In this post i am going to discuss about all these features, their functions and how to setup them for better search engine optimization. Although all these search preferences are easy to setup but wrong setup can make your blog disappear from the search engines, so read this post carefully. Now without wasting your time lets discuss about these features and how to use it.

Where to find Search preferences option ?

This is quiet easy thing, just go to your Blogger dashboard >> Settings >> Search preferences.

Now you are in search preferences section so start with the first option.

Meta Tags:

Meta tags are special HTML tags that provides information about a website to search engine robots. Although in this section you are not required to learn about meta tags because in Meta tags section it just asks for a small description about your blog. However if you want to learn more about Meta tags for better SEO then you can read my other post "Add meta tags to Blogger for better SEO".

How to setup Meta tags ?

So now, in meta tags section you will find a field called Description as shown in screenshot. In this field you just need to check the yes button and enter a short 30 - 40 words description about your blog and then save it. That's it, you are done with this field.

Now we are moving to second field which is Errors and Redirections.

Errors and redirections:

This field has two separate sections:

Custom Page Not Found:

This field is generally for setting up a page that shows 404 error if somebody hits a bad link such as the pages or posts that you have deleted from your blog or for any other page that doesn't exist in your blog.

How to setup a Custom Page Not Found ?

You can fill this field by just entering the text like 404 error, page not found or you can make it interesting by entering the text like:

Whoops! It appears you hit a bad link. My bad luck! Please click the Back arrow on your browser to return to the previous page.

 Also in this field you can use HTML tags, so if you want to attract your visitors by showing some best articles on your blog then you can make it more interesting by using HTML for example:

<h2><b>Whoops!</b></h2>It appears you hit a bad link. My bad luck! Please click the Back arrow on your browser to return to the previous page
<br/>
<h3>or </h3>
<br>
Read some best articles that i have picked from my site, just for you :
<p>&#160;</p>
<ol>
<li> <a href="Your Post Link Here">Post Title 1</a></li>
  <li><a href="Your Post Link Here" >Post Title 2</a></li>
<li> <a href="Your Post Link Here">Post Title 3</a></li>
<li> <a href="Your Post Link Here">Post Title 4</a></li>
<li> <a href="Your Post Link Here">Post Title 5</a></li>
</ol>

Now after entering the text of your choice, click on Save changes tab and you are done.

Custom Redirects:

This is a field which you can use to redirect a visitor from one link to another link automatically.

For example:

Suppose you have created a post and then you have deleted it and created another post that is an update of that post and because your deleted post is still indexed on search engines, so with this feature you can redirect the traffic of deleted post to your newly created post.

How to setup Custom Redirects?

In custom redirects field, just click on Edit as shown in screenshot and enter your old post's link in "From" section and new post's link in "To" section. Then check the Permanent box and click on save changes and you are done with custom redirects.

Note: you don't need to enter your entire post address in To or From section, just enter the address that appears after .com.

Crawlers and Indexing:

This is the third and most important field that you are required to fill up carefully. This also includes two separate sections:

Custom robots.txt:

Before setting up this field lets understand the meaning of Robots.txt file.

What is Robots.txt file ?

A robots.txt is a simple text file that website owners use to give instructions to the search engine robots that which part of their website or blogs are to be indexed or not.

How to setup Custom robots.txt file ?

In Custom robots.txt field just click on Edit and copy and paste the below code in it, as shown in screenshot.

Code:

User-agent: Mediapartners-Google
Disallow:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /search
Allow: /

Sitemap: http://www.YourBlogURL.com/feeds/posts/default?orderby=UPDATED

Customizations:

Replace YourBlogURL with your own Blog URL.

Now lets understand the meaning of above code.

User-agent: Mediapartners-Google : This command is specifically for the blogs that are showing Google Adsense ads. However if you are not using Google Adsense then you can remove this field. This command generally tells the Adsense separate robots to crawl all the pages which are having AdSense Ads.

Disallow: : This command is again for Adsense robots to allow them to crawl the entire blog.

User-agent: * : This command is used to call all the search engine robots like Google, Yahoo, Bing etc to index the pages of a blog.

Disallow: /search : This command tells the search engine crawlers not to index the search pages. In other words this command tells the search engine crawlers to not to index the URLs that contain the keyword search after the domain.

For example:

http://www.bloggenes.com/search?q=blogger&x=0&y=0

Search engine crawlers will not include such URLs to index on search engine.

Allow: / : This command allows the crawlers to index the homepage of your blog.

Sitemap: This command tells the search engine crawlers to index the every new or updated post of your blog.

How to check your blog's robots.txt file ?

You can see your blog's robots.txt file by adding /robots.txt just after your domain.

For example:

http://www.YourBlogURL.com/robots.txt

Custom Robots Header Tags:

Now this is the last field in search preferences section, it is almost similar to custom robots.txt field but here instead of writing any command you just have to tick mark certain check boxes for effective SEO. So, here i am providing the default configuration of this section that is used by most of the bloggers but if want it to configure it by yourself according to your needs then you can refer the terms related to this field to understand the meaning of each attribute of this field.

How to setup Custom Robots Header Tags ?

In Robots header tags section click on Edit and then check Yes the radio button.
Then tick mark the fields as shown in screenshots and then click on Save Changes tab and you are done with this field too.

Terms related to this field: 

Also read:

• How to increase your blog's pageviews ? (Recommended)
• How to improve Alexa ranking of your blog ?