What's the best way to eliminate duplicate page content caused by blog archives?

[ICM]

I (obviously) can't delete the archived pages regardless of how much traffic they do/don't receive.

Would you recommend a meta robot or robot.txt file? I'm not sure I'll have access to the root directory so I could be stuck with utilizing a meta robot, correct?

Any other suggestions to alleviate this pesky duplicate page content issue?

[JamesNorquay]

The best way would be to implement canonical tags on these pages,

Example from Google:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html

[lavellester]

I agree with James, best to implement canonical tags.

[ICM]

The hypothetical blog posting I want to have indexed is...

www.example.com/blog/2011/10/19

The first sentence of this blog posting is: "Jim and Janice jumped joyfully to Jackson."

I go out to google and search "Jim and Janice jumped joyfully to Jackson." There are 7 results. The first result is the blog posting I want indexed. The 2nd - 7th results are archive pages from my blog. Let's call one of those archive pages...

www.example.com/blog/2011/10

So, residing on this archive page are all of my postings from October 2011 including Jim and Janice's. Thus, there appears to be a ton of duplicate content on my site.

If I implement a canonical tag on the archive page, won't this archive page be referred to the blog posting I want indexed?

If so, that won't work. I need the blog posting and all the archive pages to remain as is but I don't want the archive pages to be indexed or show up as duplicate content.

Thoughts?

[ICM]

The hypothetical blog posting I want to have indexed is...

www.example.com/blog/2011/10/19

The first sentence of this blog posting is: "Jim and Janice jumped joyfully to Jackson."

I go out to google and search "Jim and Janice jumped joyfully to Jackson." There are 7 results. The first result is the blog posting I want indexed. The 2nd - 7th results are archive pages from my blog. Let's call one of those archive pages...

www.example.com/blog/2011/10

So, residing on this archive page are all of my postings from October 2011 including Jim and Janice's. Thus, there appears to be a ton of duplicate content on my site.

If I implement a canonical tag on the archive page, won't this archive page be referred to the blog posting I want indexed?

If so, that won't work. I need the blog posting and all the archive pages to remain as is but I don't want the archive pages to be indexed or show up as duplicate content.

Thoughts?

[lavellester]

I think I understand better now.

Use the noindex,follow tag on the content you don't want included in the search index.

If you are using Wordpress then you should check out http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/