How To Add Custom Robots.txt File in Blogger?

July 26, 2018

What is Robots.txt?

Robots.txt is a text file which contains few lines of simple code.

It is saved on the website or blog's server which instruct the web crawlers on how to index and crawl your blog in the search results.

That means you can restrict any web page on your blog from web crawlers so that it can't get indexed in search engines like your blog labels page, your demo page or any other pages that are not as important to get indexed.

Always remember that search crawlers scan the robots.txt file before crawling any web page.

Each blog hosted on blogger has its default robots.txt file which is something look like this:

User-agent: Mediapartners-GoogleDisallow:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /search
Allow: /
Sitemap: http://example.blogspot.com/sitemap.xml

Explanation:-

This code is divided into three sections. Let's first study each of them after that we will learn how to add custom robots.txt file in blogspot blogs.

User-agent: Mediapartners-Google

This code is for Google Adsense robots which help them to serve better ads on your blog. Either you are using Google Adsense on your blog or not simply leave it as it is.

User-agent: *

This is for all robots marked with asterisk (*). In default settings our blog's labels links are restricted to indexed by search crawlers that means the web crawlers will not index our labels page links because of below code.

Disallow: /search

That means the links having keyword search just after the domain name will be ignored. See below example which is a link of label page named SEO.

https://visheshgrewal.blogspot.com/search/label/SEO

And if we remove Disallow: /search from the above code then crawlers will access our entire blog to index and crawl all of its content and web pages.

Here Allow: / refers to the Homepage that means web crawlers can crawl and index our blog's homepage.

Disallow Particular Post

Now suppose if we want to exclude a particular post from indexing then we can add below lines in the code.

Disallow: /yyyy/mm/post-url.html

Here yyyy and mm refers to the publishing year and month of the post respectively. For example if we have published a post in year 2018 in month of March then we have to use below format.

Disallow: /2018/03/post-url.html

To make this task easy, you can simply copy the post URL and remove the blog name from the beginning.

Disallow Particular Page

If we need to disallow a particular page then we can use the same method as above. Simply copy the page URL and remove blog address from it which will something look like this:

Disallow: /p/page-url.html

Adding Custom Robots.Txt to Blogger

Now the main part of this tutorial is how to add custom robots.txt in blogger. So below are steps to add it.

Go to your blogger blog.
Navigate to Settings >> Search Preferences ›› Crawlers and indexing ›› Custom robots.txt ›› Edit ›› Yes
Now paste your robots.txt file code in the box.
Click on Save Changes button.
You are done!