I am a little concerned with reading around the web regarding duplicate content issues when Google decide to index the archived pages of your Blogger blogs. How do you combat this issue? I don't want the rankings to be hurt, I just wonder if there is any kind of code that will restrict Google from indexing these archived pages. The same kind of thing could be said when you use labels/tags, but I actually replaced these with a Google custom search box. Does anyone have any ideas? Thanks.
Why would you want to restrict Google bots indexing your archive? Your traffic might be affected if you are getting traffic through your archive. You have a choice to show and not to show different widgets in blogger, just play with your layout or html code.
I have found out that the categories/labels do not cause any duplication issues as they are disallowed through the Robots.txt, however the archived pages are not disallowed with a Robots.txt directive and so this can cause problems in the Google search engine. I guess all I can do is send a removal request to Google Webmaster Tools.
If you make 1 post a day, you can avoid duplicate content by setting your archive pages to show monthly or weekly archives.
If you own wordpress blog, you can simply install WP plugin called Robot Meta to tell spidey to stop crawling your archive page http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/robots-meta/