Robot Arguments

If you want to instruct web robots to follow a specific command you can do so in the head section of a web page by specifying one of the following arguments

NOINDEX = Do not index content of this page

NOFOLLOW = Do not follow links on this page

NOARCHIVE = Do not create a cached version of this page

NOODP = Do not use the Open Directory (also known as DMOZ) description in SERPs for this website / page

NOSNIPPET = Do not take information from this page for the purpose of a description in SERPs

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There are two important considerations when using the robots <META> tag:

  • robots can ignore your <META> tag. Especially malware robots that scan the web for security vulnerabilities, and email address harvesters used by spammers will pay no attention.
  • the NOFOLLOW directive only applies to links on this page. It’s entirely likely that a robot might find the same links on some other page without a NOFOLLOW (perhaps on some other site), and so still arrives at your undesired page.

An example of a robots meta tag…

<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,nofollow” />

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