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:
1. To prevent the indexing of certain pages like the sitemap, login pages.
2. To prevent the following of links on certain pages.
