How to NOfollow Labels in Blogger
There are several reasons you should use a rel=”nofollow” code on your blog. One of the main reasons is because Google bots routinely scan your blog, including your label or category tags that often return crawl errors. If you have completed my tutorial on Links In and How to Fix Broken Links, you probably already noticed that you have a few of these crawl errors yourself. You can eliminate a lot or most of these label errors by simply adding the rel=”nofollow” code into your blog template. How do you do that?
1. Log into blogger and choose the blog you want to edit from your dashboard.
2. Click on the “Design” tab and then click “Edit HTML”
3. Before making any changes to your template, you will want to save a copy of your current template to your computer hard drive. You can do this by clicking the “Download Full Template”. When asked where you want to save the template, make sure to save it somewhere on your hard drive where you know you can find it. If you make a mistake, you can simply click on the “Browse” button beside the “Upload a template from a file on your hard drive” box, locate the fle on your hard drive, double click on that file or open it. Your original template/file will then appear in the box, click on the “Upload” button and your template code will appear in the “Edit Template” text box. Be sure to click on “Save Template” or you will lose the upload. You can see all of these buttons/boxes in the picture of #4.
4. Check the box “Expand Widget Templates”
4. Hold down the “Ctrl” button then press the “F” button on the keyboard. A search box will pop up. Type the following code into this box, click on “next”:
expr:href='data:label.url'5. There are usually 2 places where you will find this code, but some templates will have 3 (like mine). Click next to find each location in your template that this code exists (2 or 3 times). Make sure to double check because if you miss one, the rel "nofollow" code will not work.
1st location on the This Lil Piglet template:
2nd Location on the This Lil Piglet template:
3rd location on the This Lil Piglet template:
6. Insert the rel="nofollow" code directly after each piece of code:expr:href='data:label.url'I have already done this in the example pictures above. Click each picture to expand and view the example and you will see the correct placement of the rel=”nofollow”7. Once you have made all these additions (2 or 3), click the “Save the Template” button. After all that, you would hate not to remember to save your additions.
If you rel=”nofollow” your labels this does not mean that all posts you have labels for will not be indexed by google bots, this just means the bots won’t search the labels. All posts will be indexed under their original title, not by label, which is what you want. Keep in mind you will not really see these changes but if you keep an eye on the next indexing of google bots, you should see a big change in your crawl errors, as mentioned in the How to Fix Broken Links tutorial.
**Although the rel=”nofollow”code tutorial works for most Blogger templates, some templates still allow google bots to create these crawl errors. The only fix is to choose a different template or have your blog designed from scratch.**
If you do this, is there a way to make one or two links on occasion to dofollow, like if you link to yourself OR another blogger?
This will only no-follow blogger labels (ie: tags) to prevent crawl errors. This won’t no-follow all links within posts, etc. Essentially if you want to no-follow all links in posts you would have to insert the code a different place in the template or manually add it to each link you want to be no-follow. If you do the broken link check, you will notice a pattern most likely. Make sense?