Robot META tags

Administration

Administrator
Mar 24, 2002
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Where to put the Robots META tag

Like any META tag it should be placed in the HEAD section of an HTML page:
<html>
<head>
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow">
<meta name="description" content="This page ....">
<title>...</title>
</head>
<body>
...

What to put into the Robots META tag
The content of the Robots META tag contains directives separated by commas. The currently defined directives are [NO]INDEX and [NO]FOLLOW. The INDEX directive specifies if an indexing robot should index the page. The FOLLOW directive specifies if a robot is to follow links on the page. The defaults are INDEX and FOLLOW. The values ALL and NONE set all directives on or off: ALL=INDEX,FOLLOW and NONE=NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW.
Some examples:

<meta name="robots" content="index,follow">
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow">
<meta name="robots" content="index,nofollow">
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow">

Note the "robots" name of the tag and the content are case insensitive.

You obviously should not specify conflicting or repeating directives such as:

<meta name="robots" content="INDEX,NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW,FOLLOW,FOLLOW">

A formal syntax for the Robots META tag content is:

content = all | none | directives
all = "ALL"
none = "NONE"
directives = directive ["," directives]
directive = index | follow
index = "INDEX" | "NOINDEX"
follow = "FOLLOW" | "NOFOLLOW"