What are robots meta tags?

What are robots meta tags?

Robots meta directives (sometimes called “meta tags”) are pieces of code that provide crawlers instructions for how to crawl or index web page content. Whereas robots.txt file directives give bots suggestions for how to crawl a website’s pages, robots meta directives provide more firm instructions on how to crawl and index a page’s content.

There are two types of robots meta directives: those that are part of the HTML page (like the meta robots tag) and those that the web server sends as HTTP headers (such as x-robots-tag). The same parameters (i.e., the crawling or indexing instructions a meta tag provides, such as “noindex” and “nofollow” in the example above) can be used with both meta robots and the x-robots-tag; what differs is how those parameters are communicated to crawlers.

Meta directives give crawlers instructions about how to crawl and index information they find on a specific webpage. If these directives are discovered by bots, their parameters serve as strong suggestions for crawler indexation behavior. But as with robots.txt files, crawlers don’t have to follow your meta directives, so it’s a safe bet that some malicious web robots will ignore your directives.

Below are the parameters that search engine crawlers understand and follow when they’re used in robots meta directives. The parameters are not case-sensitive, but do note that it is possible some search engines may only follow a subset of these parameters or may treat some directives slightly differently.