Customize your search preferences

Posted by Mohan Singh at 05:49

Hi Bloggers.

Ensuring that your blog, posts, and images are accurately indexed so they appear correctly in search results is valuable. Today we introduced a suite of new features that enable you to more effectively customize your search preferences. Managing how your blog is viewed by search engines is an important aspect of maintaining a healthy blog, regardless of whether you’re new to blogging, or a seasoned veteran.

Here’s an overview of what we added:


The first thing you’ll notice is a new “Search preferences” option under the “Settings” tab.

Clicking it will display three sub-sections: Meta Tags, Errors and Redirections, and Crawlers and Indexing. When enabled, some of these features, such as Search Description and Custom robots header tags will also appear in the “Post settings” area of Blogger's post editor as well. For example, if you elect to create a Search Description, you may do so for your blog, and/or individual posts.

Also available is the ability to add a custom “Page Not Found” (eg. a “404”) message, and Custom Redirects for pages on your blog.

While most of the new features are located in the Settings tab, a few others can be found in the post editor. For example, we’ve introduced the ability to incorporate “alt” and “title” tags to images in your post.


Last but not least, you’ll also find a “rel=nofollow” link attribute in the link tool. Checking this box means that you don’t want this link to be considered when web crawlers are searching for information they’ll use to index your page.

While most of these features are easy to understand and use, others, such as custom robots header tags are geared toward advanced users only, hence the warning message:

Before diving in, I would encourage a quick read through the Help Center articles. They’re comprehensive, and do a great job translating some technical concepts to the layperson.


We hope you enjoy the new features. It’s all part of our effort to bring you a much improved and modernized Blogger. Next week, we’ll be holding a Hangout on our Google+ page to talk with you about your experience with these features and answer your questions. Follow us on +Blogger for details.


Happy blogging!

Introducing Google Affiliate Ads for Blogger

Posted by Mohan Singh at 20:34

Blogger is a free tool that enables anyone to publish a blog and have a voice on the web. When people share words, thoughts and photos on their blogs, they’re sharing their passions with the world. Here at Google Affiliate Network, we see that many of our publishers use Blogger, and often times they’re passionate about brands or products that  they believe in. We’re excited to announce that starting today, a new gadget called Google Affiliate Ads for Blogger will be available to select U.S. Blogger users. This gadget makes it easy for Blogger users to insert an affiliate ad into a blog post and earn a commission when someone clicks the link and makes a purchase on the advertiser’s site.  Watch the video below for a quick preview:

Here’s how to get started:
If you’re a Blogger user, go to the Earnings tab on Blogger and sign up for AdSense if you don’t already have an account.

Once you have an AdSense account, you may see the Google Affiliate Ads for Blogger gadget when you write a new blog post. Note that this gadget will only be available to select U.S. Blogger users whose blogs match available ad categories, so you may not immediately see the gadget even if you have an AdSense account. We’ll be sure to let you know when we expand this program to more Blogger users.

When you write a new post, you can select a relevant affiliate ad from the “Advertise Products” gadget to the right of the post editor. The ad can be a text link, a product image, or a banner. 

Publish your post, and voilà! You may earn a commission when someone clicks your affiliate ad and makes a purchase.

We’re incredibly excited to make it easier for Blogger users to extend your influential relationship with your audiences by promoting the products you love. By providing an additional way to earn revenue, we want to help you keep doing what you love -- blogging.

Get started today by visiting the Google Affiliate Ads for Blogger website.