Meta Robots tag used to be an essential part in Search Engine Optimization but nowadays it has less effect. But just to manage how Robots or Spiders crawl your site, you may need to add a Meta Robots Tag in your HTML code.
After the <head> tag and before the </head> tag simply insert <meta name=”robots” content=” ” />
There are four possible combination which you can add in the content attribute.
1. index, follow - This is the default setting. If search engines doesn’t see a meta robot tag, it will automatically index the page it entered and follow all the links found in it.
2. index, nofollow - If you want that page to be indexed by search engines but doesn’t want the robots to follow the links.
3. noindex, follow - If you don’t want the page to be indexed by search engines but want to follow the links inside it.
4. noindex, nofollow - If you don’t want the page to be indexed by search engines and not allowing robots to follow the links.
Here’s how you write the 4 possible combination.
1. <meta name=”robots” content=”index, follow” />
2. <meta name=”robots” content=”index, nofollow” />
3. <meta name=”robots” content=”noindex, follow” />
4. <meta name=”robots” content=”noindex, nofollow” />
For more tips on Search Engine Optimization, please see also The very basics of Search Engine Optimization or SEO and Finding the Right SEO tools.
Tags: attribute, follow, index, meta robots, meta tags, robots, search engine optimization, search engines
