Blogger Label Pages and Whether You Should Noindex Them

Open Google Search Console on almost any Blogger site that is more than a year old and look at the Pages report. You will often find dozens, sometimes hundreds, of URLs under "Indexed, though blocked by robots.txt", nearly all of them starting with /search/label/. Most bloggers panic, flip on every noindex setting they can find, and make the problem worse.

Blogger label pages sit at the centre of more confusion than any other SEO setting on the platform. This guide explains what Blogger does with them by default, why that report appears, and which settings are actually worth changing for a typical blog with 50 to 500 posts.

What Blogger Label Pages Actually Are

Every time you add a label to a post, Blogger creates a page at yourblog.com/search/label/LabelName that lists every post with that label. Add a "max-results" parameter or click "Older posts" and you get more variations, such as /search/label/Recipes?max-results=20 and /search/label/Recipes?updated-max=2025-03-01.

So a blog with 30 labels does not have 30 label pages. It can easily have several hundred URLs once pagination variants are counted. That is where crawl and index noise comes from.

What Blogger Does by Default

Out of the box, Blogger serves a robots.txt file that contains a rule blocking everything under /search. Label pages and the internal search results both live there, so Google is told not to crawl them.

Blocking crawling is not the same as blocking indexing. If other pages link to a label URL, Google may still list it in its index as a bare URL without reading its content. That is exactly what "Indexed, though blocked by robots.txt" means. In most cases it is harmless: these URLs rarely rank and rarely show up for real searches.

The Noindex Advice That Backfires

The most repeated tip for Blogger label pages is to enable custom robots header tags and set "noindex" on archive and search pages. On its own, that advice does almost nothing, and combined with the default robots.txt it can contradict itself.

Here is why. A noindex tag is read only when Google crawls the page. But the default robots.txt stops Google from crawling anything under /search. Google never sees the noindex, so the label URLs stay in the index as bare entries. Bloggers then add more rules, edit robots.txt by hand, and sometimes block their whole blog by accident.

If you genuinely want label pages removed from the index, you must choose one route, not both:

Allow crawling of /search in a custom robots.txt, and set noindex on search pages so Google can see it and drop them.
Or leave the default block in place and accept the "blocked by robots.txt" entries as a harmless warning.

For most small blogs, option two is the sensible one.

One more warning. If you do switch on a custom robots.txt, copy the default file first and change only the line you need. I have audited three blogs this year where a pasted robots.txt from a forum contained "Disallow: /" and quietly removed every post from Google within a month. Test any change with the URL Inspection tool in Search Console before you walk away from it.

When Label Pages Deserve to Be Indexed

There is a case for the opposite approach. If a label page is well organised and you have written an introduction for it, it can work like a category hub. A cooking blog with a "Vegetarian Dinners" label containing 40 good posts may earn traffic from that page.

Blogger does not make this easy, since label pages have no custom description field by default. Some templates let you add a label description through a widget or a conditional block. Without that, an indexed label page is just a list of snippets, which rarely ranks. Ask yourself honestly whether your label pages look like something a reader would choose to land on.

Labels Are a Structure Problem Before They Are an SEO Problem

Many Blogger label issues come from having too many labels. I regularly see blogs with 120 labels across 150 posts, most used once. That creates thin pages, scattered internal links and a sidebar label cloud nobody reads.

Aim for 5 to 15 main labels that work like categories.
Give each post one main label, and two at most.
Merge labels used fewer than three times into a broader one.
Avoid near duplicates such as "Recipe", "Recipes" and "recipes", which Blogger treats as separate labels.

Cleaning this up does more for crawl efficiency and readers than any robots setting.

Settings Worth Checking in Blogger

Go to Settings, then Crawlers and indexing. Here is a sensible setup for a typical blog.

Setting	Recommended for most blogs	Why
Custom robots.txt	Off, unless you have a clear reason	Default rules already handle /search
Custom robots header tags	On	Lets you control archive and post settings
Home page tags	all	Home page should be indexable
Archive and search page tags	noindex	Harmless, applies if crawling is ever allowed
Post and page tags	all	Your actual content

If you have not been through the other basic options yet, the checklist in basic SEO settings most new bloggers skip covers them in order.

Making Label Pages Useful for Readers

Even when label pages are not indexed, readers use them. Show your main labels in the navigation menu rather than a giant cloud, set the number of posts per label page to around 10 to 12 so it loads quickly, and make sure each post links back to its label. A visitor who reaches one recipe should be one click from every related recipe. That internal path matters more than what Google does with the label URL itself.

FAQ

Should I fix "Indexed, though blocked by robots.txt" for label pages?

Usually no. For Blogger label and search URLs it is an expected result of the default settings. Fix it only if those URLs are appearing for real searches in place of your posts.

Can I add a meta description to a Blogger label page?

Not through the standard settings. Some templates support it with conditional code. If yours does, write it with the same care described in writing a meta description that earns the click.

Will deleting unused labels hurt my traffic?

Rarely. Labels used once or twice almost never bring visitors. Move those posts to a broader label first so no reader path is lost.

The Practical Takeaway

Leave the default robots.txt alone, enable custom header tags with noindex on archive and search pages, and spend your effort trimming labels down to a short, clear set. Treat "blocked by robots.txt" on label URLs as information, not an emergency.