How to remove the numbers in blogger post URL's

This article looks at the numbers that are in web-page addresses created by Blogger, what they mean and how you can influence them.

When you first publish a post, Blogger assigns a permanent web-address (aka an URL or a permalink) to the post.  I've previously explained how you can control the words used in this hyperlink.

A common question from people who are researching SEO for their blog is "how do I get rid of the numbers in the post-URL?".

Unfortunately the answer is not as straighforward as most people hope for.

Numbers near the start of Blogger URLS

As described in setting the content of your post's permalink, the URL given to posts published in Blogger shows the year and month of the original publication date for the post. I think this is because Blogger was originally set up as an on-line diary, with a lot of the features organised around the post-date.

Today, there are ways of giving your blog a home page, showing your posts in pages, and changing the order of the posts, which let your blog be a lot more than a date-ordered web-log.

Some blogging software (eg Wordpress) lets you choose the structure of the URLs which are used, eg leaving the date out totally, or puting it after the words.

However Blogger does not currently have any way to remove the date-part of the post URLs. And I could be wrong, but my best guess is that this will not change anytime soon.

So what options are available to remove the year and month numbers?

If you just don't want people to know the correct month and year of the post, then you can change the date before you publish the post for the the first time. Maybe make it something non-sensical (eg 1/1/1990). (However do remember that your RSS feed will show the actual date of publication, not the assigned date).

If you have some content where any month-and-year are particularly irrelevant, put it into a Page instead of a Post - because Page URLs don't contain a date.  But remember that you need to give users a way to get to these Pages, and that remember that they are not sent out in your RSS feed, so subscribers won't see the content.

The third - and least attractive - option: is to accept that this is how Blogger works and that you need to live with it or switch to another blogging tool.

Numbers near the end of Blogger URLS

Blogger puts digits at the end of post-URLs in order to make sure that each post ever published has a unique address.

Notice that I said "ever published": if you publish a post, then delete it, and then publish a second post with the same year, month and either title or customized-URL-words, then the second post's URL will have some digits put on the end, to stop it being the same as the first one.

Once a post is published, you cannot remove the digits and keep the same words and month/year.  The only way to avoid them is to make sure that your post-URLs are unique. So if you publish a post and notice that it has digits on the end of the URL, one option is to delete that post, and replace it with one which has a different publication date or customized-URL-words(don't forget to copy the post contents before you delete it!)   Or you could just set it back to draft status, and then publish it again with different and this time unique customized-URL-words.

For example, if you publish and find that you get

www.all-about-cats.com/2012-07/vegetarian-cat-food-recipes01.html

you may want to delete the post, and republish the content in a post with a different date like

www.all-about-cats.com/2012-06/vegetarian-cat-food-recipes.html

Does it really matter?

Personally I'm not convinced that having numbers in Blogger URL's is a problem.

If the content is so weak, and poorly linked to by other sites and social media that the presence of numbers in the URL is affecting visitor numbers, then it seems to me that there are more important things for you to be worrying about.

On the other hand, if your blog is already popular and well-optimized, and you're looking to get the last possible bit of SEO benefit - you'd be better off using your time to write even more good quanlity, unique, content so that your exisiting subscribers visit more often, instead of fussing over something that you cannot control.

Or am I mistaken?

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Related Articles

Setting the custom-URL for a blog post

Giving your blog a home page

Putting Blogger posts into pages

How to set the date for a post

The difference between Posts and Pages

What is RSS and why it matters for bloggers

Removing a post from your blog

Copy the contents between blog posts - and keep all the formatting.

How to set the URL for Blogger posts

This article shows how to use the Permalink options to control the URL used for a post in your blog.

URLs and Blog Posts

When you first publish a post in blogger, an URL (called a permalink in blogger) is automatically generated for that post. It looks like:

www.yourDomain/yyyy/mm/WORDS-ABOUT-MY-POST

In this URL:

• yourDomain is either your custom domain (eg fred-fish.com) or your blogspot domain if you aren't using a custom domain at the time (eg www.areyoublogger.blogspot.com)
• yyyy/mm is the year and month of the post's original publication date.

Years ago, Blogger chose the WORDS-ABOUT-YOUR-MY based on the title, or the first words in the post if the title was blank. They used some rules eg leaving out "the" and other common words, and putting numbers on the end so that every post has a unique URL (called a "permalink" in Blogger).

However Blogger have now provided a tool that lets you choose the WORDS-ABOUT-YOUR-POST separately from the post-title.

How to change the customisable part of the URL for a post

1  Edit the post in the usual way.

2  In the Post Settings area (currently at the right hand side of the editor), there is a section called Permalink.

3   Click on Links to show the options in it.

4   Click the custom URL radio button

5   Type the words that you want to use in WORDS-ABOUT-YOUR-POST into the Custom URL box

6   Click Done.

7   Finish the post, and Publish it.

Restrictions

The only characters you can use are:

• lowercase letters (ie a, b, c ... z)
• uppercase letters (ie A, B, C ... Z)
• digits (ie 0, 1, 2 ... 9)
• underscore (ie _)
• dash (ie - )
• full-stop, also known as a period (ie .)

It looks like there is no restriction on the number of characters you can put into the URL.  For example, I was just able to make a post in my test blog, with this URL:  
http://bhat-draftarticlestore.blogspot.ie/2012/07/123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-.html
(you cannot see the post, because that particular blog isn't open for public reading.)


If the combinaton of yyyy-mm from post-date (which you can change - see Setting the Post Date) and WORDS-ABOUT-YOUR-BLOG is not unique, Blogger will leave out the last character(s), and put in numbers to make it unique.

It only applies to Posts, not Pages:  the only way to influence the URL / permalink for a Page on your blog is to choose the initial words in the page-title very carefully.   (Ref:  the difference between Posts and Pages)

Why should you bother? What words should you use?

Firstly, it's only worth changing the custom words in your post-URL  if SEO matters for your blog.

If you think the change is worth it, then you need to think about what specific words
1) accurately reflect the content of your blog, and
2) are likely to be the words that people search for.

Unless you're a spammer, there is no point in making your post url www.myBlog/2012-07/hot-and-sexy-topic if your post doesn't have any content about hot-and-sexy-topic. (And if you are a spammer, you may as well leave Blogger now, before you get kicked off anyway.)

Leave out smaller filler words like "the" "a" "and" - unless they are relevant to the post-contents. For example include "the Who" if your post is about the band called The Who, but leave it out if your post is about the cats who can fly.

Lastly, many SEO experts (self-proclaimed and otherwise) say that dashes are better than dots or underscores. Only Google and Bing know if they'are correct or not. But it's probably a good idea to use xxx-yy-aaaa instead of xxx_yy_aaaa or xxx.yy.aaaa, just in case they are.

Changing the post-title after publication

Google's help-article about the custom-permalink feature says:

"because Blogger automatically creates the URL from information from your post title, your URL would change should you decide to edit the title. This would result in broken links, and fewer visitors to your blog"

This isn't the way Blogger worked before: until now, I often published a post with one title using the words I wanted in the URL, and then very quickly edit it and change the title to the words I wanted in the title. For example, for a recent post

• the URL is  http://areyoublogger.blogspot.com/2012/07/html-code-for-popular-gadgets-in.html
• the post-title is now:  Where to get the HTML code for popular gadgets in Blogger

I just tried this again in my test-blog, and found that it's still true: even if you change the title, the post URL doesn't change.

Changing the custom-URL words after publication

Originally, after you hit the Publish button for the first time, there was no way change the permalink:  if you click on the Permalink option in Post Settings, you are shown the custom value that you chose, but you cannot change it.

However you can now:

• Edit the post.
• Click the Revert to draft button.
• Edit the post URL in the same way

and the URL of your post will be changed.  Note that if you do this, the post characteristics (view count, comments) are kept.   This means that Blogger must be associating them with the unchanged internal post-identifier, not the URL.

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Related Articles

How to change the date for a post

What is RSS and why it matters for bloggers

Use a private blog to get your posts right before publish them

Linking your blog and the social networks

Moving material from one blog post to another

Deciduous blog posts leave evergreens for dead

In a social-media world, deciduous blog posts have an enormous advantage of both ever-green and ephemeral content - find out what they are, and how to use them to best advantage.

Introducing deciduous blog posts

In botany and horticulture, deciduous plants

... are those that lose all of their leaves for part of the year. (Wikipedia)

In blogging, deciduous posts are ones that your readers lose all interest in at certain times - eg posts about Christmas carols during January, or winter gardening tips during spring.

Which sounds bad.

Until you realise that deciduous posts are also ones that your readers (both current and new ones) gain renewed interest in at certain times. That means it's quite reasonable for you - and everyone else  - to mention them on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ each time that the new "season" starts.   If your posts are good, you might even get more new visits from social media in the subsequent seasons than in the first time around.

When you think about it, it's easy to see that in a social-media world ...

Deciduous blog posts leave evergreens for dead.

What does this mean for bloggers

If getting more visitors through either search or referrals is important for your blog, then you should :

• Be systematic about  how you remember to promote seasonal posts you've already published.   

• Find ways to write posts that will be become popular on a cyclical basis.

• Make strategic decisions about whether to change an existing post vs when to make a new post about a seasonal topic.

• Set up Labels or custom-redirects to send people who end up on a previous-year post to the most recent one.

Remember to promote your seasonal posts

Make a calendar of significant factors that should cause extra traffic for your blog, and send yourself a reminder message in time to review and re-share the relevant posts, according to your blog's social media strategy.

Working out exactly when do these promotions can be tricky. Ideally this is based on studying your visitor statistics (Analytics or whatever tool you use) to see when the posts got popular last time around.

You might think that you know anyway, because the seasons are obvious, but it's easy to miss earlier-than-expected surges in interest. For example, posts about Christmas music might actually be popular with music directors who're choosing their Christmas programs in September. But you do need to be careful about and where how you promote posts like this - because no one else wants to be reminded about Christmas so soon!

Finding seasonal posting reasons in non-seasonal blogs

Some blogs clearly have cyclic patterns: gardens follow the natural world, folk songs follow holidays (eg workers-rights songs for labor day, patriotic songs for national days), gift suggestions follow established human seasons (Christmas, Valentines), homeschoolers generally follow the school year.

But if you look harder, you can find seasonal patterns that apply to lots of other blogs, too. For example, one well-known blogger-helper often does a post towards the end of the American college year reminding people to transfer ownership of their blogs to a non-college Google account.

Ways to do this include:

• Blogging about the similarities (or differences) between your niche and some unrelated by widely-known seasonal event  (eg "Writing poetry is not like Christmas because ...".
• Writing about famous people in your topic who have died - close to their anniversary or birthday.   
• Making up your own seasonal patter  eg   "In March, Crotchet-Blogger celebrates cable-stitch". 

Promotion existing posts vs publishing new ones

A big question for bloggers with deciduous blog topics is whether they should publish a new post each season, or just polish and promote the existing post(s).

The answer depends on the nature of the information each season:

Situation	What do do
Are there changes to the information each season?	Make a new post, link to it from the last season's posts, promote it like you do any other post.
Does exactly the same information apply each year	Review the existing post, and then promote it on social media - and perhaps in the blog itself or in other new posts.

For example, one of my blogs is about public transport news in my city.  This has clear seasonal patterns around public holidays, the tourist season, a major sporting event, and the academic year.   The sporting event causes the biggest peak, with web-traffic up by 600%, week-on-week.  Each year's  information for it is very similar: buses leave at (roughly the same time) from (exactly the same place) for (close to the same fare) as last year. But each year there are changes: slightly different times, different effects on other bus services, one year there was a park-and-ride. So for this blog, I do a new post each year.   And I go back into last year's post and add a line like

"This information is for 2013.   Click here for this year's bus services."

and I make the "here" link to a label search for the topic, so that the most recent post will always come up first in the list.

By comparison, in another blog, I've published a printable sheet of non-religious Christmas carol words for which copyright has expired.  Over time, it will be possible to add extra carols to this.  But this won't happen each year - and all the existing content will continue to be relevant forever. So I don't republish this in a new post each year.   Instead, I promote it with a gadget on the sidebar, and I share the post on my social media accounts for the blog.

Be aware that if you do decided to make a slight change to an existing seasonal post, rather than write a new one:

• RSS subscribers probably won't see the enhanced post in their feed.
• Follow-by-email subscribers will see it.

Other things to think about

When you thinking about how you can get the more traffic using the deciduous posts in your blog, there are a few other factors to keep in mind:

Look for multi-year cycles

Some events happen once every 2, 3 or more years. For example:

• Some sports events (the Olympics, the Volvo Ocean race, the Commonwealth games) happen every-so-many years. 
•  Leap years happen once every four years.
• In some countries, elections happen every five years.

These multi-year patterns can be even more powerful than the every-year ones, because less people are aware of them, and readers in general are not-so-likely to remember what you wrote four years ago.

Don't forget the Southern Hemisphere

Spring starts in September, not February, if you live in the bottom half of the world. And cars need to be prepared for winter in April, not November.

This may mean that you can re-promote posts based on natural seasons twice a year - or that you should target some seasonal posts by hemisphere.

Some readers have different holidays

It's easy to think that all your readers are just like you, and live with the same seasonal patterns that you do.   But that's not always true:

• People who don't live in America might not even know when Thanksgiving or Black Friday is, much less what it means.

• In many Western countries, Christmas is a holiday even for people who aren't religious. But there are countries where Christmas isn't a holiday at all and most people don't even know it exists.

How have you used seasonal / deciduous topics to get new interest in your blog?

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Related Articles:

Mapping out your blog's social media strategy: how your blog works with your Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc accounts

5 reasons why SEO doesn't matter for your blog

Using labels to categorise blog posts

Transferring a blog to a new owner

Follow-by-email, an easy way to offer email subscription to your blog

Help visitors who arrive at your blog via a link to a deleted post

If you sometimes delete posts from your blog, then it's a good idea to provide some help to people who who arrive at your blog via links to those posts.

(Even if you don't have any links to those posts, it's likely that a search-engine somewhere will have some - and other people may have bookmarked or shared them, too.)

There are two options for doing this:

Post-specific redirects

Use these if you want to re-direct visitors who come to a particular previous post:

Go into Settings > Search Preferences, click Edit beside Custom Redirects.

Click New Redirect, to create instructions for what to do if a visitor tries to navigate to a specific post.

Put the address of the post that you want to make a re-direct for into the From field.

Put the address of the post that you want to visitors to be taken to into the To field.

For both addresses, the part you need to enter is the URL of the post from the first backslash on.  

Do not put in your blog-address

Do include the date-part of the URL and the backslash.
eg
for    http://areyoublogger.blogspot.com/2013/01/changing-a-label-value-for-all-posts.html
use   /2013/01/changing-a-label-value-for-all-posts.html

Tick the Permanent check-box.

Click Save.

Click Save Changes.   (Yes, you need to do both Saves)

A generic page-not-found message

Use this if you do not want to set up post-specific re-directs, or if you cannot remember the URL of your deleted posts.

Go into Settings > Search Preferences, and edit the Custom Page Not Found option.

Put in some text welcoming the visitor, explaining that the page they were looking for is no longer available, and suggesting other places that they could try.

 This text can include links to other posts, so long as you hand-code them. (You might like to get code for this using the post editor).

Dealing with the "Keyword not provided" problem in your statistics

This article explains why the proportion of "keyword not provided" visits to most websites is increasing, and gives you options for finding out what keywords people are searching for when they reach your blog.

Why the percentage of not-provided search visits to your blog has increased

If SEO is important for your blog, and if you therefore watch the Stats > Traffic Sources tab in your Blogger dashboard or your Google Analytics results, you'll probably have seen that proportion of your search-visitors whose keyword is "not provided" has gone up a lot recently, to be more-or-less 100% of your Google search traffic.   (In the Blogger Stats tab "not provided" isn't shown - but the number of visits per keyword is now massively less than the vists from Google.)

This is no accident: Google is now witholding the keywords that people use, and (says that) this to protect your visitor's privacy. The issue has been widely discussed in sites like SearchEngineLand.

Opinions vary, but many people believe that

"Not knowing keywords has big implications if you use data about what people search for to decide how to develop your blog." [tweet this quote].

For example,   I publish listings of the contents of old (ie graphical copyright expired) song-books in a particular niche on one of my blogs.  There are far too many songs for me to load the full text or sheet music of all of them. And this is a niche with lots of competition:   there are a zillion websites distributing song-lyrics (most illegally).  But by watching the search-terms that led people to arrive at certain pages, I can identify particular songs that people were looking for and not finding anywhere else (the so called "long tail" of search keywords). If these songs are now in the public domain, I can make a dedicated page for them, and share what I know - in many cases after doing more research and pulling together information from a range of different sources.    Not knowing the keywords that people use to get to the book-listing pages would totally destroy this approach.

What you can do about it

So far I've identified three alternative options for getting data about what my visitors are searching for.

Ask for user-provided information

I've used Google Docs to make a data-collection form, and invited my visitors to use it to tell me about songs they are looking for.

The advantage is that I can ask them for richer information than just the keywords, eg where / when they remembmer it from, multiple snatches of the lyrics, what style the music is, etc.

But the disadvantage - and it's a big one - is that it only works for people who actually get to my site and then go into the other page where this form is kept, and fill in the form. I don't want to go into details - but let's just say that I haven't been run off my feet!

Get data from WebMaster Central

If you have verified your blog in Google Webmaster Tools, then the Search traffic > Search Queries tab shows the queries that have caused your blog to show up in search results pages, as well as how many times this has happened and what position, on average, you had in these pages.

This is richer information than you get from Analytics or Blogger-Stats, which only tell you about people who actually visited your blog.

But the disadvantages are that data is only kept for 90 days, and it only shows the top 2000 keywords.   Both of these are issues for me - some of my song-book contents are seasonal - if something is being looked for now, then the moment (week, month) may have passed by the time that I've noticed the trend, researched the song and written it up to a standard that I'm happy to publish. So really I want to checking the logs for nine months ago, so I can research things that are likely to be popular again next year.

Get data from AdWords

Advertising campaigns are the one place where Google is passing the search-keywords through to back-end systems. And because of this, Adwords does have data about what your visitors are searching for - provided you've set it up to collect this data. To get it up:

Firstly, sign up for an AdWords account. You probably have to deposit $10 into the account to get started - but you don't actually need to set up any advertising campaigns or spend any money after that.

Then link your AdWords account to your Google Webmaster Central account.

Once this is done, Adwords will start collecting the search-keywords for your blog. To get at the data:

• Log in to AdWords
• Select "All Online Campaigns,"
• Make an empty campaign (if you haven't got one already)
• Go to the "Dimensions" tab
• Change "View" to "Paid & organic".

AdWords will display your stats, since you signed up and linked your account. This includes the top search terms that users got to your site with, number of clicks, number of queries and some other measures too.

I'm only just starting to assess how well this will for for my song-listing site - will update this post when I have more specific information about how well it works and whether I can get actionable results from it.

What other alternatives have you found?

Leave a comment below, and I'll expand this list as we find out more options for accessing keyword-based search traffic information.

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Related Articles:

Using Google Docs to put a survey questionnaire into Blogger

Six reasons why SEO doesn't matter for your blog

How to set up Twitter's "view summary" cards to work with Blogger posts

This article shows how to install Twitter Cards into Blogger - and explains why you might do this if Twitter could be an important source of visitors for your blog.

What are Twitter Cards

Recently, Neil Patel explained why having social sharing tags installed into your blog can be important, and I've written a little more about it specifically for Facebook and Blogger here.

Twitter, for reasons best known to themselves, have developed their own version of social media meta-tags, called "Twitter Cards".    (Apparently they do make some use of Open Graph tags - but not for Twitter cards displays.)


Two things happen inside Twitter when someone tweets a message including a link to a website or blog that has Twitter-cards installed.  

Firstly, the message has the words "View Summary" under it, instead of just "Expand".

Secondly, when someone in Twitter clicks the View Summary link, more information (ie a "Twitter Card") is shown about the contents of the link - like this:

In his post, Neil Patel also stated that if you don't use Wordpress,

"you’ll need to manually generate meta tags for each page on your site"

but fortunately for Blogger users who are brave enough to edit their template that's not quite true.

How to install Twitter Cards into a blog made with Blogger

There are two simple steps needed to set up Twitter sharing tags for your blog:

• Adding the code to your template, and then 
• Asking Twitter if you've got it right.    

The 2nd step is necessary because (for whatever reason) Twitter won't use the tags you have installed until you've tested them in Twitter's own validation tool.

Step 1   Add the Twitter Card meta-tags to your template

Edit your template in the usual way.


Find the   </head   statement, and just before it add the following lines of code:

<!--  START - TWITTER CARD TAGS   -->
<meta name="twitter:card" content="summary"/> 
<meta name="twitter:site" content="@YOUR-TWITTER-ACCOUNT-NAME"/> <meta name="twitter:domain" content="YOUR-BLOG-URL"/>

<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == &quot;item&quot;'><meta name="twitter:title" expr:content='data:blog.pageName'/><b:else/>
<meta expr:content='data:blog.homepageUrl' name='twitter:url'/>
<meta expr:content='data:blog.pageTitle' name='twitter:title'/></b:if>

<b:if cond='data:blog.postImageThumbnailUrl'><meta name="twitter:image:src" expr:content='data:blog.postImageThumbnailUrl'/><b:else/><meta name="twitter:image:src" content='URL-FOR-IMAGE-YOU-WANT-TO-USE-IF-THERE-IS-NOT-A-THUMBNAIL-PHOTO-IN-THE-POST' /></b:if> 
<b:if cond='data:blog.metaDescription'><meta name="twitter:description" expr:content='data:blog.metaDescription'/><b:else/><!-- Still looking for a way to use the post snippet if there's no description --></b:if>

<meta name='twitter:url' expr:content='data:blog.canonicalUrl'/>
<!--  END - TWITTER CARD TAGS   -->

Except, you need to replace a few items with your own values:

• YOUR-BLOG-URL - with your blog's address (eg for me, it's areyoublogger.blogspot.com)

• YOUR-TWITTER-ACCOUNT-NAME - with the Twitter account name for your blog. (This line is optional)

• URL-FOR-IMAGE-YOU-WANT-TO-USE-IF-THERE-IS-NOT-A-THUMBNAIL-PHOTO-IN-THE-POST - with the web-address of an alternative picture to use if the post doesn't have a thumbnail image.

Save the template changes.


(Twitter also have a code-generator - but it's for websites in general, while I have configured the code above to use some of the values that Blogger makes available to us.)

Step 2   Validate your domain

After you have done the first step, go  https://dev.twitter.com/docs/cards/validation/validator.  This is Twitter's validating tool, where they check if your code meets their requirements.

Log in using your Twitter account.  
You do need to have a Twitter account yourself - or at least one that is dedicated to the blog - to use the validator and thus to install Twitter Cards.


Click the Validate and Apply tab.


Enter the address of a post from your blog and press Go.


If you're using a browser that supports showing Twitter Cards, then a preview of the card for your post will be shown in the right side of the screen.   Check that this looks correct.


Look at the list of results of your Twitter-card values shown on the left of the screen.   If any of them show a red-dot, then there is a problem that you need to fix.   Typically this will be because you've accidentally left out a quote mark when you were adding your custom values.

Fix any problems, and enter the blog-post URL again - keep going until you get a green dot at the top of the list.    (Some of the twitter card values are option, so it doesn't matter if they show as grey because they're irrelevant for a Blogger site.)


Enter the URL of your blog overall  (ie not a specific post).

• If you do nothave a custom domain (ie your blog is  myBlog.blogspot.com), then make sure you enter the blogspot.com URL, not the country-specific one (eg   myBlog.blogspot.in).   This is important later in the validation process.

• Fix any problems for this as well.   (There shouldn't be any, but I think it's worth double-checking, especially if you modify the twitter-cards code in any way.)

Press the Request Approval button at the top of the left hand sidebar.


Confirm the administrative details on the screen that opens - by default it will be filled in with details from your Twitter account.   You may be asked for:

• Contact information for the person responsible for administering cards on your website (name, email address, Twitter handle)
• Website information:   the URL (ie the domain), and a description.   Note:  if you are based outside the USA and don't have a custom domain, then most probably your country-specific address will be shown here.    Change it to the blogspot.com   address.
• Whether your site publishes images or videos that may contain sensitive content (eg nudity, violence, or medical procedures) - so that Twitter can warn viewers before showing them.
• The website's Twitter-name.

Press Submit Request.

After a moment, if your details are correct, Twitter shows a message saying 

"Thanks for applying to be part of Twitter's cards service. We'll review your request as soon as possible. Expect a few weeks for turn-around time. You will receive an email when your request has been reviewed."

I'm not sure if they apply this to all (or indeed any) countries or Twitter accounts:   when I installed Twitter Cards for this site, I got an email in a few minutes saying .

Your Twitter card is ready!
We've activated the summary card for areyoublogger.blogspot.com.
If you want to use other kinds of Twitter cards (and we know you do), please make another request.

And the cards themselves were activated on a test-tweet that I did a few minutes after that.

What your readers see

If you have installed the Twitter Cards correctly, your current readers should see nothing different when they visit your blog or when they read your posts via email or and RSS feeder.

But when they include a reference to your blog in something that they send out inside Twitter, the content that they (and their followers) see is a nicely formatted card rather than an ugly-url.

Troubleshooting

Search Descriptions

Twitter cards will only work properly if you have enabled Search Descriptions for your blog, and if you have entered one for every post that is tweeted.    I looked for ways around this using the post-snippet, but haven't found a way to make this work yet.

Country-specific redirects

Neil Patel suggested one tag that is not included in the standard Twitter Cards documentation: twitter:url

Using it gets around the problems associated with country-specifc URLs for blogspot domain blogs, by changing any Tweets of them to the blogspot.com page, instead of having your tweets split across multiple urls.

I've included it in my list of tags, customized to take its value from Blogger.    However I'm not yet 100% sure if it will work - and will update this article accordingly.

Pictures

I've set up the image tag to use the thumbnail picture for each post - because that is the only one that you can access on a systematic way for each post.

Twitter's rules say that pictures must be less than 1mb in file size, at least 60px by 60px, and that ones larger than 120px by 120px will be resized.    However Blogger may have a thumbnail photo for some of your posts that is less than 60-by-60.   For these it is likely that your default image will be used instead.

The only way to over-ride this is to use a post-specific Twitter meta-tag which points to a larger photo like:

<b:if cond='data:blog.postURL == &quot;URL-OF-THE-POST&quot;'><meta name="twitter:image:src" content='URL-FOR-IMAGE-YOU-WANT-TO-USE-FOR-THIS-POST' />
</b:if>

Domains

Twiter's documentation was initially a little sketchy about which specific domain should be validated. Some people reported having to validate all three possible URLs, ie

www.your-blog.blogspot.com
your-blog.blogspot.com
/*your-blog.blogspot.com

although it is possible that this has now been resolved.

What other problems have you encountered with Twitter Cards?

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Related Articles:

Adding Facebook's Open Graph tags to your blog

How to edit your template

Post.thumbnail: a summary image for each Blogger post

Linking your blog to the social networks