Technical Seo
Meta Robots Tag
An HTML meta tag placed in the head of a page that gives search engines directives about indexing and link following. Common values include noindex, nofollow, noarchive, nosnippet, and max-snippet.
Why Meta Robots Tag Matters for SEO
The meta robots tag gives you page-level control over how search engines treat your content. It's more granular than robots.txt and lets you allow crawling while preventing indexing, control snippet length, or prevent caching of specific pages.
How Meta Robots Tag Works
You add to a page's head section. Multiple directives can be combined. You can also target specific bots using their name instead of "robots" (e.g., name="googlebot"). The X-Robots-Tag HTTP header provides the same functionality for non-HTML resources.
Common Mistakes
- Using contradictory directives like index and noindex on the same page
- Not knowing the difference between meta robots and robots.txt scope
- Forgetting that max-snippet and max-image-preview can limit your SERP appearance
Sources & Further Reading: