What Use Is the Blog Archive Gadget?

What is the Blog Archive Gadget? It is a gadget you install on your Blogger blog to show you all your blog posts organized by year and by month and by post.

Click on a year and each month that you wrote for your blog appears. Click on a month and all the blog posts for that month appear. In fact, every month and every year that you've been blogging is clickable and therefore, openable. Click yourself from the year to the month to a specific post you wrote in order to browse all your posts in the order in which you wrote them.

That's the main use for the Blog Archive Gadget. It's useful because it is complete. Just like its name implies, it's a complete archive of every post you've ever published. It's even more useful because you can use it to categorize your posts by year and by month.

As useful as that sounds, it would be easy to assume that Google uses the Blog Archive Gadget to index your site and make it available to people who are searching the web. Unfortunately, this does not appear to be so. The illusion that Google will use the Blog Archive Gadget to index your blog is the downside of the Blog Archive Gadget.

Unfortunately, I've fallen for that illusion in the past. For too long now I've depended on the Blog Archive Gadget to organize my blog. No more.

The problem with the Blog Archive Gadget? None of the links that it points to are really true links. Instead, each link it points to is actually a search result.

That's right. Whenever you click on a Blog Archive link, you are really invoking a new search. Each so-called link under the Blog Archive Gadget is really a request by the Blogger search mechanism to search your blog within a range of dates. For example, clicking on a specific month is a search for all blog posts that fall within the first day of that month and the last day of that month.

It doesn't take a genius to figure out that a search engine, such a Google Search, is not going to build its search results on top of another search engine's search results. Searches derived from other searches? That makes no sense.

It appears that Blogger searches via the Blog Archive Gadget are separate and distinct from Google searches. A different search mechanism means entirely different results. Furthermore, Google is not likely to use one search mechanism in order to build the search results for another search mechanism. Translation? Forget the Blog Archive Gadget if you think it is going to improve your search results.

As a practical matter, I've learned that the Blog Archive Gadget will not help my blog to get a better search engine ranking. I no longer expect the Blog Archive Gadget to help make my blog more visible to the search engines.

In the past, I've found the YouTube search box works in much the same way. YouTube searches are very different from searching for a YouTube video under Google Search. When I can't find a YouTube video using the YouTube search box, I fall back on the regular Google Search. So often, where Youtube Search fails to find the video, Google Search succeeds. That's what I mean by different.

The same is true with the Blog Archive Gadget. It's just a search mechanism. Think of it as a search box with an unboxy look and feel.

Since the Blog Archive Gadget can do nothing but searches, it cannot possibly be used to organize your blog and to establish linking relationships between posts.

You need another linking mechanism besides the Blog Archive Gadget to tie you blog posts together. This is especially true if you want your blog discovered by the search engines. It was only recently that I figured this out.

The lesson? It's possible to assume something is happening when in fact nothing is happening.

It was a rude wake-up call for me when I discovered recently that Google was not cataloging my blog posts at all. I wrote about this problem in one of Google's product forums:

Search Box on Blogger Only Works on Oldest Posts

It was my attempts to fix this problem that led me to the understanding of what the Blog Archive Gadget really is and what it most definitely is not. Again, the Blog Archive Gadget does not help you to be cataloged by Google's Search Engine. Nor does it help your blog get better search results.

The better way? The Label Gadget. I write about this here:

15 Benefits of the Label Gadget

Blindly I was expecting the Blog Archive Gadget to do what only the Label Gadget could do for me and that is organize my posts in such a way that if Google crawls one or more of my posts, it can then crawl all my posts. Find one, you find them all. That's the essence of the Label Gadget.

In short, the Label Gadget does what the Blog Archive Gadget will never do and that is link all my blog posts together into one cohesive unit organized by topic.

I will continue to use the Blog Archive Gadget, if only to give me a sense of the chronology of my blog. That's about the only use I've been able to discover for it, really. Otherwise, in my mind at least, the Blog Archive Gadget is obsolete.

Ed Abbott

15 Benefits of the Label Gadget

This morning, I'm exploring the many benefits of the label Gadget. Here are some benefits, plus facts supporting these benefits, I've been able to gather so far:

1. The label gadget ties all your posts together that cover a specific topic. It makes your blog better by giving you better topic focus and better topic organization.
2. Posts can have multiple labels. For example, a single post on your Blogger blog can have the following labels: dogs, cats, and animals.
3. Each label is a so called permalink. Permalinks are indexed by search engines. That's probably why they are called permalinks. The term permalink implies permanence. Permalinks give your blog posts a permanent address. They also help give your blog a permanent presence on the web.
4. Perhaps a better name for labels is topics or categories. Each time you add a label to your blog, you are really adding a new topic to your blog. In other words, a new category or sub-category
5. In the example above, animals is a category and dogs and cats are sub-categories.
6. Don't get too hung up on categories versus sub-categories. The English language cares little about making a technical distinction between the two. Likewise with the label gadget. You are free to create categories and sub-categories to your heart's content. Why? Because categories and sub-categories live together and play together on the same level playing field. The label gadget doesn't know the difference—a good thing that makes the label gadget easy to use.
7. While the label gadget does not know the difference between a category and a sub-category, you do. Since you know the difference, you can easily turn your entire blog into a nicely organized hierarchy of categories and sub-categories using the label gadget.
8. It's my best guess that the combination of permalinks and a hierarchy of topics helps Google Search better understand the importance and relevance of your blog. With better understanding comes visitors that are more likely to appreciate your blog.
9. When you revisit a topic in a new post, you recycle the label (topic) by applying the old label to the new post.
10. Any number of posts can fall under one label. Got 1,000 posts that fall under one topic? All 1,000 posts can fall under the one label that describes that topic.
11. All the posts that fall under one label (topic) are gathered together and placed on the same page with a permalink supplied by Blogger for the address.
12. In effect, each label you add to your blog adds a new page to the blog. These new pages are above and beyond your blog posts. For example, a blog that has 10 posts and 5 labels has at least 15 pages.
13. Without something like the label gadget tying things together, your posts are ships in the night passing each other without one knowing about the other.
14. The label tool ties your blog together hierarchically the same way a website's navigation bar ties the website together hierarchically.
15. A hierarchical link structure is one of the most effective and time-proven techniques for getting your pages recognized by search engines.

Everything in life has an organizing principle. Planets orbit stars and starts make up galaxies. The whole universe is a hierarchy.

Without an organizing principle, your blog posts are grains of sand rubbing up against each other, but never quite establishing a relationship. The label tool establishes an organizing prinicple. When you use the label tool, you are organizing your blog by topic.

Ed Abbott