Yikes! I missed this post last week about Blogger automatically adding the meta noindex tag to all Blogger blogs. That’s bad, and although it appears to have been fixed, I’m really surprised there wasn’t a bit more of an uproar over this one.

Why is it a big deal?

The noindex meta tag tells all the search engines not to index your blog. If they find the tag they’ll remove your blog from their indexes as happened to Technical Bliss and SEOptimize.

Also, depending on the strength of your site it can take a loooong time to get back the engines after something like this. If you have lots of backlinks and been around a while, you’ll be ok. However, if your blog is newer it might take some time to get back to where you were.

What can you do about it?

Not much unfortunately however, I recommend:

• Checking to make sure your all your Blogger blogs no longer have the noindex meta in the source code. To do this view source via your web browser then do a search for the word noindex. If that’s still in there let me know in the comments here, I’d like check it out, I can help with a fix as well if you don’t know how.
• Checking to see if your blog is still indexed at Google. To do this, search Google using this command:

site:YourBlogUrlHere.com (http:// is not needed)
If you don’t get any results back, you are not indexed.

• I’d also look closely at your traffic stats for the last couple weeks. If you notice a large drop off you were likely affected by this problem.
• If you are currently not in the index and are sure the noindex issue has been fixed on your blog, start posting. A few fresh posts will go a long way in getting the spiders to come back an index your site again.

I hope this helps some of you, everything should be in working order now, but it’s worth checking into!