How to use the meta tag "ROBOTS"

How do you explain a spider of a search engine you only want him to index just the first page of your website or he is allowed to index the whole website. You use the so called ROBOTS tag.

The robots meta tag is not the same as the file called robots.txt  You should use these two together. Both are used by the seach engines like Yahoo and Google. If you use this meta tag the wrong way you might shut the search engines out. So the influence of this meta tag is significant.

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


Example meta tag robots

Add the following meta tag in the HTML source of your page:

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


• The spider will now index your whole website.
• The spider will not only index the first webpage of your website but also all your other webpages.

you are also allowed to type it like this:

<meta name="robots" content="INDEX, FOLLOW">
<META NAME="robots" CONTENT="INDEX, FOLLOW">
<META NAME="robots" CONTENT="index follow">

By changing the index to no-index and the follow to no-follow your are able to influence the behaviour of the spider. If you don’t want the search engine spider to crawl through your whole website you use the following meta tag :

<meta name="robots" content="index, no-follow">

• The spider will now only look at this page and stops there.

<meta name="robots" content="no-index, follow">

• The spider will not look at this page but will crawl through the rest of the pages on your website.

<meta name="robots" content="no-index, no-follow">

• The spider will not look at this page and will NOT crawl through the rest of your webpages.

This metatag can also be typed with the   /  in the end of the tag:

<meta name="robots" content="index, no-follow" />
<meta name="robots" content="no-index, follow" />
<meta name="robots" content="no-index, no-follow" />