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Robots.txt contains the guidelines or rules for the bot-crawlers about how they will crawl and index your website or blog. Blogger allows to set some very basic SEO settings very easily from the dashboard. One of them is setting a custom robots.txt for your blogger.

When a robot search engine crawler is visiting a page or website, robots.txt is the first thing it looks for is the robots.txt file. As a Blogger user you now have the option to control what the search engine crawlers should follow and index from your website or blog.

Every blogger blog has a default robots.txt but with advanced changes in blogger you can change it according to your needs. In this post, you will know about the default robots.txt of blogger, how to add or edit a custom robots.txt for your blogger blog and some useful examples of robots.txt with an adsense friendly one. So lets get started.

Default Custom Robots.txt of Blogger Blog

Every time you create a blog in blogger a default robots.txt is created and until you change it by the setting is dashboard it remains same.

User-agent: Mediapartners-Google
Disallow:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /search
Allow: /
Sitemap: http://yourblogslink.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?orderby=UPDATED

It is same for each blog and it is adsense friendly. If this is able to satisfy your SEO need for the blog that you do not require to replace it by adding a custom one in by dashboard settings.

How to Add Custom Robots.txt in your Blogger Blog

Follow these instructions below;

• Go to your blogger dashboard > Settings > Search Preferences > Crawling and Indexing

• Click Custom robots.txt > click yes.

• Paste you custom robots.txt. (An example is given below)

• Click Save changes to save the custom robots.txt.

Thats the way to insert or edit custom robots.txt. Now lets see how to write a custom robots.txt for blogger.

A Proper Custom Robots.txt in your Blogger Blog

The following example is a proper robots.txt for your blogger.

# robots.txt of mysite.blogspot.com thanks to http://getguide.blogspot.com/
User-agent: Mediapartners-Google
Disallow:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /search
Disallow: /p/*
Disallow: /view/*
Disallow: /?m=1
Disallow: /?m=0
Disallow: /*?m=1
Disallow: /*?m=0
Allow: /
Sitemap: http://yourblogslink.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?orderby=UPDATED
Sitemap: http://yourblogslink.blogspot.com/atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1&max-results=500

The above example is an adsense friendly custom robots.txt for your blogger. Now we will explain what each line means here and what more you could add to your custom robots.txt.

Tips for Writing a Custom Robots.txt for Blogger Blog

# robots.txt of mysite.blogspot.com thanks to http://getguide.blogspot.com/
This a comment line. You can add more and this will not affect you sites SEO or robots crawling what so ever. I suggest you to keep this line on if this post is helping you.

User-agent: Mediapartners-Google
Disallow:

These lines are only for the adsense crawler. If you are or want to display adsense it is and/or want to; this line allows the adsense crawler to visit all the pages of your site as per the adsense guideline. If it is not required you can simply remove them from the robots.txt. Then the adsense crawler will follow the instruction you have set for all the crawlers.

User-agent: *

This is used for all the crawlers (except ones for which a separate rule is set, here the adsense crawler) and all instructions are written below it.

Disallow: /search

This line indicates that any page with /search in the URL will not be crawled and indexed by the crawler. These line is very important for making your blog SEO friendly as it stops search engines to stop indexing label, search query, archive pages. Because they are not a unique page or URL and also to avoiding duplicate content.

Disallow: /p/*

To block robots to crawl the pages for your blog. But if you want your pages to be indexed by crawler then just delete this particular line.

Disallow: /view/*

Stops crawling of the bloggers %%% links. If you are using %%% views then just remove this line and if you are not using it them dont remove the line.

Disallow: /?m=1
Disallow: /?m=0
Disallow: /*?m=1
Disallow: /*?m=0

These lines are here to stop robots crawling of mobile redirect pages. If you do not use them, you might see your blogs links in mobile search results have ?m=1 or ?m=0 with them. They are necessary to avoid the duplicate pages problem. If you are not facing these problems or if you dont need them you can remove them.

Allow: /

After you adder the instructions for restricting crawling, these line tells the robots that other links in these blog are free to crawl and index.

Sitemap: http://yourblogslink.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?orderby=UPDATED
Sitemap: http://yourblogslink.blogspot.com/atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1&max-results=500

These lines basically indicates the links to you blogs site map(s). Replace yourblogslink.blogspot.com with your blogs URL. If you are using a custom dommain in your blogger blog, then use that URL.

More Expert Tips for Custom Robots.txt in Blogger

Now some additional tips for customizing the robots.txt for your blog.

Prevent a Certain Page for Crawling

For preventing a certain page, post or link in your blog all you need to do is to add a new disallow rule after User-agent and before Allow: / like this:-
Disallow: /p/secret-page.html
Disallow: /2014/01/secret-post.html

As you see, all you need to is to add the link after the yourbloglink.blogspot.com. Now if you want to stop crawling posts from a particular year add Disallow: /2014/* and posts from a particular month of the year add Disallow: /2014/01/*. As you see you can go nuts according to your needs.

Adding Separate Instruction for a Particular Robot Crawler

If you want to add crawling instructions for a particular robot add this line:-
User-agent : Name of the bot
Then add the Disallow rules and Allow rules respectively. In place of Name of the bot you need to add the particular name(User agent) for your desired robot crawler (List of robot crawler).

Adding More Sitemap

You can add multiple sitemaps in the robots.txt. Sitemap: 

http://yourblogslink.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?orderby=UPDATED is default for every blogger blog, but you can add more. For example: Sitemap: http://yourblogslink.blogspot.com/atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1&max-results=500; this is for the first 500 post for your blog. You can add more. Here are some useful links to understand blogger sitemaps.


Do not want the any robot. Then delete everything and use;

User-agent: *
Disallow: /
Or stop a particular robot to crawl your blog, then use;
User-agent: Name of the bot
Disallow: /
Check and Analyze your Robot.txt

There are many tools available in the web for checking your robots.txt. But for checking how the google robots (i.e..Adsbot-Google, Mediapartners-Google, Googlebot) will crawl in your blog you should use google-webmasters tool. For this; go to your websites webmaster dashboard > Crawl > Blocked URLs. Using it you can see how these robots works on your blog according to your specified robots.txt.
That all you need to know about blogger custom robots.txt.

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