Making blog searchable

So far, it bugs me that my blog cannot be searched by search engines.

By default, every blog you create will be shown on your Blogger profile page. If you decide to disable this feature, then, besides removing the blog from the profile page, Blogger will also automagically make it unsearchable. It achieves that by adding the following <meta> tag to your blog:

<meta name="ROBOTS" content="NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW" />

FYI, the above tag is generated by <$BlogMetaData$> tag in your template code.

This is usually the intended effect: if you don't want the public to know about the blog, then you shouldn't want it to be found accidentally through search engines, either. Indeed, this is a fair rationale to make.

But sometimes, you will find a case where you still WANT your blog to be searchable. For example, consider this scenario: you want to post comments on some blogs here on blogspot, but these blogs require you to log-in in order to post. Quite often, commenting on those blogs is a one-time deal: you post comments on them every once in a while, and that's it. You don't want to know much about them, and you just don't want too many strangers reading your blog. So, the obvious solution is to disable the blog listing. But going with this choice, you basically prevent yourself from searching on your own blog.

So, what would you do?

The trick I use here is to get rid of the <$BlogMetaData$> tag altogether, and from there I can create my own set of <meta> tags.

Before the change, I viewed my blog XHTML source, and I saw that the <$BlogMetaData$> tag generates the following:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; 
  charset=UTF-8" />
<meta name="MSSmartTagsPreventParsing" content="true" />
<meta name="generator" content="Blogger" />
<link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml"
  title="b0nybl0g"
  href="http://b0nyb0y.blogspot.com/atom.xml" />
<link rel="service.post" type="application/atom+xml"
  title="b0nybl0g"
  href="http://www.blogger.com/atom/12015033" />
<link rel="EditURI" type="application/rsd+xml" title="RSD" 
  href="http://www.blogger.com/rsd.g?blogID=12015033" />
<meta name="ROBOTS" content="NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW" />
<style type="text/css">
@import url("http://www.blogger.com/css/blog_controls.css");
@import url("http://www.blogger.com/dyn-css/authorization.css?
  blogID=12015033");
</style>

So, from the above bits, I simply change "NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW" to "INDEX,FOLLOW" for ROBOTS meta tag and paste this modified text in place of the <$BlogMetaData$> tag inside my template code.

After getting the change republished, the blog becomes less private, but now I can search my own blog. :-)