The robots
value for the name
attribute of the <meta>
element (often called a "robots tag") defines the crawl and indexing behavior that web crawlers should use with the page. If specified, you define instructions for crawlers in the content
attribute of the <meta>
element as a comma-separated list of one or more rules.
For example, to hint to crawlers that a page should be excluded from their search indexes, a noindex
value can be used:
<meta name="robots" content="noindex" />
Note: Only cooperative robots follow these rules. A crawler still needs to access the resource to read headers and meta elements (see X-Robots-Tag: Interaction with robots.txt). If you want to prevent bandwidth consumption by crawlers, a restrictive robots.txt file is more effective than indexing rules as it blocks resources from being crawled entirely.
Usage notesA <meta name="robots">
element can have the following additional attributes:
content
The content
attribute must be defined, and its value sets indexing and crawling behavior for cooperative search engine robots. Accepts one or more of the following keywords as a comma-separated list:
index
Allows the robot to index the page. This is the default behavior. Used by all major crawlers.
noindex
Requests the robot not to index the page. Used by all major crawlers.
follow
Allows the robot to follow links on the page. This is the default behavior. Used by all major crawlers.
nofollow
Requests the robot not to follow the links on the page. Used by all major crawlers.
all
Equivalent to index, follow
. Used by: Google.
none
Equivalent to noindex, nofollow
. Used by: Google.
noarchive
Requests that the search engine not cache the page content. Used by: Google, Yahoo, Bing.
nosnippet
Prevents displaying any description of the page in search engine results. Used by: Google, Bing.
noimageindex
Requests that this page not appear as the referring page of an indexed image. Used by: Google.
nocache
Synonym of noarchive
. Used by: Bing.
There are several important considerations to note when setting a robots
meta value:
<meta>
tag, robots still need to access the page to read these rules. To reduce bandwidth, consider using a robots.txt file instead.<meta name="robots">
tag and robots.txt
serve different roles: robots.txt
controls crawling, while the robots
meta tag influences indexing and other behavior.robots.txt
may still be indexed if linked from other sources.noindex
directive will only take effect after the robot revisits the page, so ensure robots.txt
doesn't prevent this.index
vs. noindex
or follow
vs. nofollow
, are mutually exclusive. Behavior is undefined when conflicting values are used.X-Robots-Tag
, which is useful for non-HTML content such as PDFs or images.The following example uses nofollow
to request that a crawler doesn't follow links on a page and noindex
to request that the page is excluded from indexing:
<meta name="robots" content="nofollow, noindex" />
Specifications
While not part of any specification, it is a de-facto standard method for communicating with search bots, web crawlers, and similar user agents.
Browser compatibilityThis feature is intended for crawlers to observe, so "browser" compatibility doesn't apply.
See alsoRetroSearch is an open source project built by @garambo | Open a GitHub Issue
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