Should I block Google from indexing my categorized archives?

ccano Peon

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Hi, about a week ago, I posted this.

I've had my blog up for exactly 2 months now, and up until now I was barely getting any search engine traffic (except for some MSN hits).

This week, though, I've been getting massive traffic from Google. I guess that means I'm somewhat out of the sandbox.

The problem is... Google has only indexed my home page, not my individual blog posts. So let's say someone searches for "Video Game X", and my post on Video Game X is in the August archives, the Google listing will show my home page Title along with a description of what I wrote for Video Game X.

Then the person will click onto my home page and see nothing about Video Game X (because it's in the archives, not the home page), and they'll leave. This results in probably nonreturning visitors for me AND they don't click my Adsense ads because they never end up finding what they're looking for.
Click to expand...

I submitted a sitemap to Google, and now I seem to be getting hits from my Categorized Archive pages, for example, a page with ALL the posts about a certain brand of video game. But I'm still not getting hits to my INDIVIDUAL blog posts.

I'm patient, I can wait to get hits to my individual pages. My question is whether I should use a robots.txt to block Google from indexing my Categorized Archive pages. The problem is, I think, that the content from my individual posts is in the archives, and they might conflict with each other in the search engines, since it's identical content.

Do you think it's important for people to see my general archives in Google?

Thanks