Blogger Adds Advanced Webmaster Features

Blogger blogs are no longer that limited. After adding support for static pages and favicons, Blogger added some new advanced features to the "search preferences" section of the settings page.

Now you can edit the description meta tag without editing the template. If you edit the description meta tag for the entire blog, you can also write descriptions for your blog posts. This is useful because Google's snippets sometimes rely on this meta tag.

For the first time you can create a custom 404 error page for a Blogger blog without buying a domain. Just "enter an HTML message that will be displayed on the Page Not Found page instead of the generic message." Google has some tips for creating useful 404 pages and there's even a widget powered by Google search that shows related links and a search box with appropriate search suggestions.

You can also create custom redirects, but only for internal URLs. For example, you can redirect http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/mailto to http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2012/02/open-mailto-links-using-gmail-in-google.html. Make sure that you leave out the first part of the URL (http://googlesystem.blogspot.com) when you create the redirect.

There are also options for customizing the robots.txt page and robots header tags. It's probably a good idea to use Blogger's robots.txt page as a template (http://yourblog.blogspot.com/robots.txt) and only add some new pages you want to be ignored by search engines.

Updated Code for Google +1 Buttons

As reported last month, the code for Google +1 buttons could be improved so that the buttons load faster and stop blocking other resources. Google updated the code and recommends publishers to generate a new code.

"We're introducing a new asynchronous snippet, allowing you to make the +1 experience even faster. The async snippet allows your web page to continue loading while your browser downloads the +1 JavaScript. By loading these elements in parallel, we're ensuring the HTTP request to get the +1 button JavaScript doesn't lead to an increase in your page load time," explains Google.


Google also optimized the existing code so that the button renders up to 3 times faster. Even if you don't update the code, you'll still benefit from these changes.

The code generator is easy to use and I've noticed that a lot of sites added a +1 button next to Facebook's "Like" button. It's unfortunate that Google didn't optimize the code when it was released.