Google Webmaster Tools And Label Searches

As a publisher of a Blogger blog, besides publishing articles, you have to know how those articles are being read. Just as knowing who is reading your blog, you need to know who is indexing your blog. The Google Search Engine, which feeds 2/3 of the known major search engines, provides Google Webmaster Tools, so we can monitor how well our blogs are being indexed.

If you're going to use Google Webmaster Tools effectively, though, you need to know what reports show problems needing attention, and what reports advise us of problems avoided. Representative of the latter, we have a message in the list of URLs restricted by robots.txt, which can be found from a link in "Overview", or from "Diagnostics" - "Web Crawl".

http://blogging.nitecruzr.net/search/label/Search Engines URL restricted by robots.txt

This list, when run against a blog which has a lot of labels, will be rather long. This will cause panic in the hearts of many. Fortunately, this is unnecessary panic.

The keyword here is

/search/label/

and this shows us a label search that is blocked, intentionally by Blogger, so the search engines won't follow it. Were they to index a label search, they would be indexing the same posts in the blog that they find from the sitemap. They would then penalise the blog, in their indexing, for "duplicate content".

So, when you see "... /search/label/ ... URL restricted by robots.txt" in your access report, don't panic. This restriction is to your advantage.

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