What are Robot Meta Tags and why do you care?

Meta elements are tags used in HTML or XHTML documents to provide structured metadata about a Web page. They are part of a web page’s head section. Multiple Meta elements with different attributes can be used on the same page. Wikipedia

These tags called Robot tags, tell the search engines what to do and how to view your website.

The code would look something like this
[codesyntax lang=”html4strict”]

<HEAD>
 	<title>Page Title</title>
 	<META name="robots" content="NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW" />
</HEAD>

[/codesyntax]

 

This tells the search engine two things. One, to not index this page NOINDEX. Two, do not follow any links to other pages NOFOLLOW.

Here are a list of tags to use for your website.

Function COde Summary
Indexer: ignore content;Robot: follow links

<META name=”ROBOTS” content=”NOINDEX”>

Use this for pages with many links on them, but
no useful data, such as a site map.Because “follow” is the default, you don’t have to include it.
Indexer: include content;Robot: do not follow links

<META name=”ROBOTS” content=”NOFOLLOW, INDEX “>

Use this for pages which have useful content but
outdated or problematic links.
Indexer: ignore content;Robot: do not follow links

<META name=”ROBOTS” content=”NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW”>

This is for sections of a site that shouldn’t be indexed and shouldn’t have links followed. Putting access control, such as a password, is much better for security.
Indexer: include content;Robot: follow links

<META name=”ROBOTS” content=”INDEX,FOLLOW”>

This is the default behavior: you don’t have to
include these.
Search results pages should not show “cache” link <META name=”ROBOTS” content=”NOARCHIVE”> Useful if the content changes frequently: headlines, auctions, etc.

The search engine still archives the information, but won’t show it in the results.

Search results pages should not display the Open Directory Project (ODP) title and description for the page.

<META name=”ROBOTS” content=”NOODP”>

Encourages search engines to use the page title tag, and match term in context, or META Description tag content instead of the ODP content, which may be misleading or outdated.

This is a big one to use.

Search results pages should not display the Yahoo Directory title and description for the page

<META name=”ROBOTS” content=”NOYDIR”>

Same as above, only for the Yahoo directory, and the other search indexers will ignore it.
Search results pages should not display any description or text context for this page. Title only, I guess. <META name=”ROBOTS” content=”NOSNIPPET”> Encourages the search engines to use the title only, and to suppress the “cache” link. Might be useful if the site has special plus box listings in search results, but otherwise, not so much.

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