Blogger (Blogspot). How to Hide a Website from Search Results

As any website builder, Blogger provides SEO tools so you can hide your blog from search engines like Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo etc. However, the platform doesn’t give you complete freedom over the process. Website indexing is only manageable by settings and without direct access to code.

To prevent a Blogger blog from being indexed, navigate to the blog Settings > Privacy, and turn off the “Visible to search engines” switch. Alternatively, you can navigate to the blog Settings > Permissions and set non-public Reader access so search engines can’t reach site content.

Let’s dive into the details.

Right before we start: If you’re looking for a guide to block indexing for a particular Blogger page, read this post: How to Hide a Blogger (Blogspot) Page from Search Results

Prevent a blog from being indexed with Privacy settings

1. Select your website
2. Go to the Settings section on the left sidebar
3. Go to the Privacy section
4. Switch off Visible to search engines

You might be wondering what does this setting do?

As you can see, the description says “Allow search engines to find your blog,” so it must be blocking crawlers from indexing the website. But how it works under the hood?

Well, this setting does three things:

1. Prevents search engines from indexing your website by setting Disallow: / for all crawlers User-agent: * in robots.txt

2. Removes the sitemap reference from robots.txt

   Here’s my robots.txt file before disabling Visible to search engines

   User-agent: Mediapartners-Google
   Disallow: 
   
   User-agent: *
   Disallow: /search
   Allow: /
   
   Sitemap: https://allaboutwebco.blogspot.com/sitemap.xml

   and after

   User-agent: Mediapartners-Google
   Disallow: 
   
   User-agent: *
   Disallow: /search
   Disallow: /
   
   User-Agent: googlebot
   Disallow: /search
   Allow: /

3. Sets X-Robots-Tag: noindex, nofollow header for every single page of the website

   If you want to learn more about this topic, read Block Search indexing with noindex article by Google Search Central.

Prevent a blog from being indexed with Permissions settings

Unlike the previous method, this one works indirectly because the primary intent of this feature is to restrict access to a website for a certain category of users.

Everyone who tries to open your blog must be authorized via Google so the system can verify their permissions.

Consequently, search engine bots aren’t able to crawl and index the website due to a lack of rights.

Follow these steps to configure it:

1. Select your website
2. Go to the Settings section on the left sidebar
3. Go to the Permissions section and click on Reader access
4. Set Reader access to Private to authors or Custom readers.
5. Click on the Save button

Summary

There are two ways of hiding a Blogger website from search engines, and both take a little effort to implement. Just a few minutes of work with settings.

It is worth using the first method (Privacy settings) to do this properly. Why? Because its primary purpose is to prevent a website from being indexed in a way that search engines expect.

If you end up with the second method (Permissions settings), it would be a good move to additionally utilize the first method to explicitly “say” to search engines that your website should not be indexed. Otherwise, not doing this might hurt your blog’s SEO if you decide to index again.