Meta Robots Tag

Have you ever wondered what the robots file on your website is for? Maybe you were using WordPress and stumble upon this particular unknown tag that name ="robots" content="index" > says.

What is a Meta Robots tag?

The Meta Robots Tag is a tag that tells search engines what to crawl should and should not do. It is a piece of code in the section of your website. It is a simple code that allows you to decide which pages you want to hide from search engine crawlers and which pages you want to be indexed and viewed.

Another function of the meta robot tag is that it tells search engine crawlers which links to follow and which links to ignore.

What happens if you do not create a Meta Robots tag?

But if you don't have a meta robot tag, don't panic. By default, search engine crawlers will try to index all your websites and follow the links. Let me clarify that search engine crawlers following your links are not bad at all.

Basically, the meta robot tag can be broken down to four main functions for the search engine crawlers:

• FOLLOW - a command for the search engine crawler to follow the links on this web page.
• INDEX - a command for the search engine crawler to index this web page.
• NOFOLLOW - a command for the search engine crawler NOT to follow the links on this web page.
• NOINDEX - a command for the search engine crawler NOT to index this web page.

Pretty simple, isn't it? Well, there are a few more commands for the meta robot tag, but these four are the main functions. These four functions are what meta robot tags are most often used for.

An example of meta robot tag code would look like this:

<meta name ="robots" content="index">

This tag is used to index the web page it is on. It's like telling someone to get a glass of water to get a glass of water. Because again indexes the Search Engine by default already your website, even if you do not use this code.

And you can also combine the commands if you want:

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

For me, this code is a good thing, but rather a small thing to keep in mind - especially when trying to work intelligently with Link Juice around by applying nofollow to some outbound links. Apart from that, it's not something you need to recheck every saturday when you edit your SEO.