Robots Meta Tag for SEO
What is the robots meta tag?
Robots meta tag is a meta tag used to instruct robots on how to deal with a certain page in terms of indexing, following and archiving.
Robots meta tag usage:
The robots meta tag is inserted into the head section of a page.
A simple example of a robots meta tag in an html document
<html>
<head>
<title>This is the Title</title>
<META NAME="robots" CONTENT="content">
</head>
<body>
body text
</body>
</html>
The name attribute of the meta tag should always be “robots”.
The content attribute can have several parameters namely : index, noindex, follow, nofollow
Here are the various forms that robots meta tag can take:
<META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”INDEX, FOLLOW”>
<META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOINDEX, FOLLOW”>
<META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”INDEX, NOFOLLOW”>
<META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW”>
Robots meta Tag notes
- The default value is “index, follow” so there is no need to specify this directive.
- “index” means that the pages should be indexed in search engines
- “follow” means that robots should follow the links on the page
- “noindex” means that the page should not be indexed in search engines
- “nofollow” means that robots should not follow the links on a page.
- Another directive which can be specified in the content attribute is “noarchive”. This prevents the caching of pages by search engines.
- The content attribute of the robots meta tag can also be “none” which is the same as using “noindex, nofollow”.
Importance of Robots meta tag
- To prevent the indexing of certain pages like the sitemap, login pages.
- To prevent the following of links on certain pages.
Conclusion
The robots meta tag, while not being very important in determining rankings, should be used carefully and effectively to make sure that only the required pages are indexed by search engines. Also, I would like to end by saying, that if you use wordpress, install the robots meta plugin and save yourself some hard work
Category: On Page Optimisation