Crummy Blog History Widget

Blogger's blog history widget seems like something that you would want to use. It seems like it would provide a way to access any content on the blog. After tyring it out, I don't think that I will ever use it again.

Why not? What's wrong with it?

In the first place, I don't think it helps to find something of interest. It just allows you to find somthing in a certain time frame. And that doesn't seem very helpful to me.

In the second place, it causes duplicate content, perhaps even triplicate content. On one level, it creates composites of post pages within each period of time. On another level, it creates some kind of "/search?" entities at least at the yearly level.

In the third place, the composite blog history pages make the post pages become supplemental results. Before they decided to totally deny the existence of the supplemental results index, they used to explain that inferior pages, especially ones containing duplicate content, might be put in the supplemental index so that they could be included in the search results pages (SERPS) when not enough results could be found in the main index. What they will always refuse to admit is that pages which get included in the supplemental index are blocked from being included in the SERPS for typical searches -- or at the least, not well ranked. The problem seems to stem from the fact that the blog history pages have more content than the post pages and thus the post pages are the ones that contain dulicate content. I would have expected google's own blogger tool to help in using website best practices instead of making you use website worst practices.

So just by using the blog history widget, there is a risk of damaging the web presence of a blog. In some cases adding the widget to a blog and later removing it can really clobber a blog, so I can't recommend removing the widget if you have already used it. Changing the Settings->Archiving->Archive_Frequency from something other than "No Archive" to "No Archive" will delete the archive pages. It may seem like that would be a good idea, but, those archive pages are in the caches and will remain in the caches for a very long time. This leads to all kinds of problems. I did that to this blog and, at least for now, webmaster tools says !Site not indexed. On the other hand, maybe they are just mad at this blog.