How to make Google’s Blogger more search engine friendly

Google owns Blogger is one of the best online blog services available. Blogger is not very search engine friendly, though, and the Blogger team even managed to block Google’s search engine crawlers from indexing some of the Blogger blogs.
Pandia takes a look at the Blogger/Google relationship and what a blogger can do to make a Blogger blog succeed in the search engines.
When size hinders learning and collaboration
Running a huge multinational company is hard. You may gather the best talent in the world, but there is always a limit to how many people any person can interact with. Because of this, there will be instances when independent business units do not communicate, even when needed.
Yahoo! is a company known for its “silo mentality”, where institutional barriers and struggles for power and money hinder active cross pollination of ideas.
Google has been known to be acutely aware of the problem and is clearly better at handling it.
Visiting the Google headquarters up at Mountain View I was told that their focus on interaction even applies to the famous Google cafeteria.

Someone had complained about wasting 7 minutes standing in line for lunch. Google then did a study and found that six minute queuing was good for competence dissemination. People talked to colleagues they didn’t know in the line, opening up new possibilities for interaction and creativity. They changed the queue system, though, to stop people from being distracted by the food so they could focus on interaction!
Still, there are limits to what even Google can do as regards interorganizational learning.
Google owns Blogger, one of the most popular online personal blog tools available. Still, even if it is owned by the world’s leading search engine company, Blogger has been amazingly search engine unfriendly.
Content warning stopping spiders
One example of how this may pan out, is the recent case of Blogger blocking Google’s search engine crawlers from indexing Blogger blogs. Not all Blogger blogs, mind you, but for a company that wants to index all content everywhere, it must have been kind of embarrassing to find its search engine crawlers being banned from even a few of them.
Blogger has a feature that lets the bloggers (or the Blogger team) add a content warning splash screen to the blog.
Anyone trying to enter this blog will first be presented with a web page warning them that that they are about to view may contain content only suitable for adults. This may apply to disturbing images, controversial topics or even adult content.
This is an excellent feature in our view, but the problem was that the content warning page contained no regular link to the blog itself, only a button triggering a javascript (which the search engine spiders do not follow).
As one Blogger blogger put it:

“Even if Blogger is a part of Google, no one has apparently told the Google spiders how to find away around this javascript. Nor has anyone told the Blogger people to change the code of the content warning page (or to give the spiders another route around this hurdle). Now nearly all my listings in Google give a title and description from the Content Warning page, and I am pretty certain that they will disappear soon as well.”

That did not happen.
In this case the Blogger team did registered the complaints over at Google Webmaster Help .
It probably also helped that WebProNews took an interest.
In late January Blogger presented a new content warning page that did let the crawlers through. (That this new page also blocked users of Internet Explorer 6 is another matter. They are working on it.)
Still, it took years for Blogger to fix this problem.
Now, this may have something to do with the fact that Blogger can be used as an efficient tool for spamming. Setting up a large number of free Blogger blogs promoting porn, may seem like a good idea to some living on the shady side of the Web.
Given that Blogger can set up a content warning even if the blogger do not ask for it, Blogger could have used the content warning page to dis-encourage spammers from using Blogger for this purpose.
On the other hand, Blogger may achieve the same effect by handing over a list of spam blogs to their colleagues responsible for Google Web Search. This way they could have punished non-spammers delivering content behind the content warning wall.
More Blogger search engine problems
Let’s make one thing clear: We like Blogger.
Its current incarnation is a huge improvement compared to the previous. It is easy to use for beginners who cannot or will not learn anything about HTML and CSS, while at the same time it is flexible enough for more advanced users.
We hesitate to recommend it for professional blogs, let alone corporate sites, but then again it was never meant for that kind of use.
Blogger is for those who want to put up a personal blog or a blog focusing on their passions. If you need a blog like that, you can have one up and running in less than an hour using Blogger.
Still, you would like people to find your blog in the search engines, wouldn’t you? This means that you should be able to to use the most common tactics for letting the search engines and your potential readers know what the various blog posts are about.
Unfortunately Blogger is, in general, not particularly well adapted to search engine optimization, even when it lets the search engine crawlers through.
There are no metatags
You cannot add Keyword or Description metatags to Blogger.
Some would probably argue that this doesn’t matter, as the search engines do not make use of these anymore.
We agree that the keywords metatag probably has no or merely a negligible effect, but Google may make use of the description metatag for their listings, and you should be able to control that. You cannot with Blogger.
We propose that Blogger add a description field for all blog posts, a field that can be used for the first paragraph, for summaries, and for the Keyword description tag.
You cannot control spider access to individual pages
There is no robots.txt, nor can you add robots metatags to individual pages. So as search engine crawling goes, it is all or nothing.
Under the Settings/basic tab there are two settings that are relevant for spider access. Select “Yes” under “Let search engines find your blog”. If you select “No” Blogger will add a NOINDEX metatag to all your pages. So far, so good.
Be very careful about the other relevant setting, however. If you select “No” under “Add your blog to our listings” (meaning that Blogger makes your blog visible on the Blogger network), Blogger will add a NOINDEX tag, regardless of what you answer under the “Let your search engines find your blog” option. Hence, you must answer Yes for both.
We propose that blogger add an Index/Noindex tick box for all posts.
No nofollow tags
You cannot add nofollow tags to links.
Google would like you to add such a tag to links to untrusted content, paid links and to pages of no value to searchers.
In Blogger that is not possible, unless it is done in the HTML view, unintelligible to many Blogger users. Given that others may report you to Google for having paid links, and such links may harm your search engine rankings, that might be a problem.
We can see that Blogger would hesitate to add too many options to the interface, and regular users may be confused by a button for “nofollow links”. We do not think that will be much of a problem, though, as users normally ignore features they do not understand.
What can a Blogger blogger do to succeed in the search engines?
Fortunately, the current incarnation of Blogger does allow for some search engine optimization. The blog post headline will be included in the TITLE field (the text found in the browser window bar), so do include important keywords in the headline.
There is no introduction/summary field, but be sure to use the first paragraph to tell the reader as well as the search engines what the post is about.
If you want to use the blog to follow a particular topic, it might be useful to select a name that reflects this topic, although we see that this may not always be advisable. Still, the name of the blog will be reflected in the URL, like this: thisismyblog.blogspot.com. The URL will be visible in search engine results, and may entice interested searchers to click on your link.
Do also include the relevant keywords in the regular blog post text.