What is the robots meta tag?
The robots meta tag is an HTML element placed in the page head that gives per-page instructions to search engine crawlers — such as noindex (don’t index), nofollow (don’t follow links) and noarchive. It works alongside robots.txt, which controls crawling at the site level.
Why the robots meta tag matters
It is the precise tool for page-level indexation control. Use it to keep thin pages, duplicate content and private pages out of results without affecting the rest of the site.
Common directives
- noindex: exclude the page from search results.
- nofollow: do not follow links on the page.
- noarchive: do not show a cached copy.
- max-snippet: limit the description length.
- noimageindex: exclude page images from image search.
Robots meta vs robots.txt
robots.txt prevents crawling; the meta tag prevents indexing. A noindexed page can still be crawled — and must be, for Google to see the tag.
Related terms
How Social SEO Team can help
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