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Blogger Tricks and Hacks - How to Optimize Blogger and Fix Duplication Error

In this article on Blogger tricks you'll find tips and hacks on how to optimize blogger and make it search engine friendly by Swapping the blog title with the post title and fixing the duplication of content error.

I have concluded the series on Blogger help which all focused on how to present your blog and content in a way that appears organized and professional or friendly to your users.

But to be successful with your blog and blogging you have to learn to please two people, your users (which we have covered) and the search engines.

All the blogger tips and tricks you'll learn how to do from this article is how to please the later party, which is the search engines and this is paramount to your success online.

Writing about Google blogger blog on this site has really been a great (though tiring) experience for me.

Before writing the series on using Google blogger for blogging, I never fully understood how the blogspot blog works.

But since I know a great number of beginners to blogging would rather start with a free blog site most of them using Google Blogger, I had to learn how to get the most out of blogger for blogging in other to reach a good number of beginners.

I didn't bargain for what I found out about Google blog optimization.

The Google blogger is very poor with optimization as you will see from the explanation below.

Thank God for the different blogger hacks users are coming up with everyday. I just picked out the most important of the blogger tricks being used and this article will cover all.

Optimization Issues with Blogger blog and Why

Blog Name in place of Post Title

When your posts are displayed in the search engines, the way it is supposed to display for easy page ranking is 'Title of blog post followed by the Name of your blog'.

This way you can rank for blog posts that are not even directly related to what your blog topic is about.

But in blogger templates, by default it shows your blog name first followed by title of post, which is wrong.

Meta Tags and Content Duplication

Apart from the fact that the software is not optimized for search engines, your meta tags and content gets duplicated after you make a post.

When typing a post in blogger dashboard, there is no where to add keywords and description.

So what happens is that it uses the description and keywords in your template meant for your home page in all your posts. That's terrible but not the worse.

The worse is that Google indexes posts and comments differently.

So it means that the content in every page that has comments gets indexed twice. That creates duplicate copies for each of those pages.

So without knowing it, you commit one of the grievous crimes against the search engines - Content duplication. No wonder legit blogspot blogs gets deleted!

The blogger tricks below doesn't even completely save your ass if you use Google blog, it only curtain it.

Optimizing, Correcting Meta tags Error and Minimizing Content Duplication

Blogger Tricks 1: Swapping your Blog post title in place of Blog name

Go to "Edit HTML" find (CTRL + F) the code highlighted in the image below.

Then replace with the code highlighted below.

If you already have content on your blog, you should immediately see the difference when you view your blog.

Blogger Tips and Tricks 2 : Manually adding Meta tags to template

Meta tags basically give the search engines the most important information about a blog/website that you want them to know about and index.

You also can use meta tags to tell the search engines whether or not to index a particular page.

Meta tags are usually found at the header <head> section of the website's information.

To read more about meta tags Click here

To add meta tags to blogger blog, first copy and edit the codes below. changing the capitalized letters to the information you'd rather the search engines sees on your site.

<title>"TITLE_OR_NAME_OF_YOUR_WEBSITE</title>

<b:if cond='data:blog.url == data:blog.homepageUrl'>

For the "SEE_BELOW" you have three options to choose from.

- INDEX,FOLLOW - Index this page and follow all links.

- INDEX,NOFOLLOW - Index this page but do not follow or index links on this page.

- NOINDEX,FOLLOW - Do not index this page but follow all links.

- NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW - Do not index this page. Do not follow or index links on this page.

Use the one that meet your desire for the page.

After editing the codes, go to "Edit HTML" on your dashboard and add the codes in between the <Head> </Head> section of your template and Save.

Now note that the data you have entered above only optimizes your home page.

So if you don't individually add meta tags to each of your posts, you are telling the search engines to use your home page's meta tags for all your posts, which creates duplication of meta tags.

Moreover, your posts are ranked individually so you want to optimize each one that you write so that they could have a good shot at been properly ranked.

So how do you optimize each post you write?

Tricks 3 : How to Optimize posts individually

First write and publish the post.

Then click on "Edit HTML" to download the template just in case you mess things up.

Next find the tag <head> in your template. Just immediately after it, paste the following codes.

<b:if cond='data:blog.url == "http://URL_OF_YOUR_NEW_POST.html"'>

Edit the bold text as appropriate and save your template.

Tip on tricks 3

This means that every time you post, you will have to go through this! Sorry.

Anyway, to reduce the amount of codes you will have to add in the template (can you imagine the codes that would have been added by the time you hit 233 pages?) and stress on your part, only do this for posts you really want to get ranked.

Now here is a little hope for you. You can automate the optimization of all your blog posts if you want to.

Though the trick behind this doesn't properly optimize your pages but it gives you an alternative (that is if you don't want to use the trick above) to displaying the keywords and description of your home page for all your posts.

This trick simply uses your your blog name and the title of post as keywords/description.

This could help a little with the search engines but definitely not much since it could lead you to committing another crime.

It is not advisable to use exact title of your blog and post as description. It could be seen as keywords spamming.

Go to "Edit HTML". Use CTRL + F to find the code <b:skin<<![CDATA[

Just above it paste the code below.

<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "item"'>

With this settings we already have, your newly set up blog still has two very sever errors that needs to be taken care of.

The first is that most of your pages will still read your home pages description (if you use trick 3 and the advice of optimizing only important pages).

The second error you have is duplication of content. Though this wouldn't be your fault but it can ruin your blog.

Like I said before Google will be indexing your posts and comments differently. Since a separate part of a page can not be indexed without indexing the full page, it means all your pages with comments gets indexed twice.

So without wanting to, your content gets duplicated.

Tricks 4: Fixing Duplication of Meta tags in Blogger

To ensure that the description meant for your home page only shows up for the home page, you have to use HTML tag to condition the description that you have added in your template.

<b:if cond='data:blog.url == data:blog.homepageUrl'><meta content="GENERAL_DESCRIPTION_HERE" name="description"/></b:if>

As usual edit the lines capitalized as it applies to you.

Sidenote : As I was about doing this for our Google demonstration blog, I realized that the space that carries the description was already conditioned with this code.

So I am suggesting that you first check your template to be sure it's not there before adding this code.

If you already typed and saved a description in your template, all you have to do now is add the opening code <b:if cond='data:blog.url == data:blog.homepageUrl'> above and the closing code </b:if> below your already typed description.

Having done that, you have erased one very fatal error that could have lead to your blog being deleted for content duplication.

Tricks 5 : Fixing Duplication of Content resulting from the indexing of Comments

To fix this, click "Edit HTML". Just on top of the code box click "Expand Widget templates". Then with your CTRL + F find the code

And replace it with <b:if cond='data:post.commentPagingRequired'><a expr:href='data:comment.url' title='comment permalink'> <data.comment.timestamp/> </a><b:else/><a expr:href='data:blog.url + "#" + data:comment.anchorName' title='comment permalink'> <data:comment.timestamp/> </a></b:if>

Save template.

Blogger Tricks 6: Reducing the load on your Blog Archive

This blogger trick might not be necessary if you are just starting out.

A Blog Archive shows each of your monthly posts in one page. Now if you make lots of posts each month, it simply means that when readers click on a particular month's archive link, it will take time to load.

And the loading speed of a site has recently become one of the factors used for ranking sites.

Like I said, this trick might not be relevant to you now. But it is still good to know it anyway.

To reduce the load on your Blog Archive go to "Edit HTML" followed by "Expand widget template".

Then find the code <b:include data='post' name='post'/> and replace with this code below

<b:if cond='data:blog.homepageUrl !=data:blog.url'><b:if cond='data:blog.pageType != "item"'><b:if cond='data:blog.pageType != "static_page"'><li><a expr:href='data:post.url'><data:post.title/></a></li><br/><br/><b:else/><b:include data='post' name='post'/></b:if><b:else/><b:include data='post' name='post'/></b:if><b:else/><b:include data='post' name='post'/></b:if>

There are more blogger tips, tricks and hacks available to get the best from your blogger blog, but I have only discussed the most important ones to your blogging success.

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