Blogger Static Home Page - Google Search Results

I thought I would add a quick update on how Google indexed my Blogger static home page. One of my main concerns was that Google might not like the Blogger page redirect in the search results. Frankly, it was difficult to tell just what kind of redirect Google was using.

First, take a look at the search results. This static home page blog is already indexed by Google and looks to have been successfully indexed:

Note that the URL does not show the final redirected URL of http://statichomepage.blogspot.com/p/home-page.html - which is a good thing.

Now, taking a look at the actual page HTTP response you can see that Google does a 302 temporary page redirect for the static home page:

From what I could see on the Google help pages and forums, this looks good for Blogger static home pages. Take a look at this response from a Google representative on 302 redirect behavior.

To quote the representative from Google, "Generally speaking, with a 302 redirect we'd try to take the content of the redirect target (in your case PAGE-B) and index it under the redirecting URL (in your case PAGE-A). If the target has a noindex meta tag, then it's likely that we'd apply that to the redirecting URL as well."

Creating a Blogger Static Home Page

Seems like there's always an unusual case where you want to create a Blogger blog with a static home page instead of the reverse order blog posts instead. I see this question quite often in the forums and support pages of other sites. Though this isn't a typical configuration for Blogger, the recent changes in the new layout editor have made this easier than ever without having to spend time editing the template code as you had in the past.

Add the Static Home Page

The first step is to simply create a static page in Blogger called something like 'Home Page' from the Blogger Pages menu item. Don't call it 'Home' yet because we're going to alter the home link later. When you click on the 'Pages' left menu item in the Blogger editor main menu you'll see that there is already a 'Home' link on the screen. Ignore that for now--just go up to the 'New Page' drop down box and select the 'Blank page' option: