Meta robots

What is meta robots?

Meta robots is an HTML tag in the head of a web page that gives search engines instructions for that single page. It controls whether the page may be indexed (index or noindex), whether links are followed and how much text Google may show as a snippet.

Why is meta robots important?

• Control per page: you keep pages with no search value out of the results.
• A cleaner index: search engines mainly see the pages that matter.
• Snippet control: options such as nosnippet and max-snippet limit how much text is shown.

Examples of meta robots

• <meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow"> for a thank-you page
• <meta name="robots" content="noindex"> for internal search results
• <meta name="robots" content="max-snippet:160"> to limit the length of the snippet

How do you use meta robots?

Add the tag to the head of the page, or use the setting in your CMS or SEO plugin. Do not also block the page in the robots.txt file, because then Google cannot read the tag. Read more about this under technical SEO.