Robots meta tag [Archive] - Search Engine Watch Forums

bubbles

11-03-2005, 06:09 AM

Hi

Sorry if I'm in the wrong place but I couldn't see exactly where to ask my question.

Someone has mentioned I should be using “Quote<meta name= "robots" content= "index,follow"> "UNQUOTE" as search engines tend to read the frame and not all the text???

Can anyone explain this for me at all please, as I always thought you only used the robots tag if you didn't want a search engine to spider something?

I am fairly new to this side of things although learning quite fast but have to admit I'm a bit confused by this one.

Any advice would be much appreciated.

Thanks

Denise

SanDiegoSEO

11-03-2005, 12:32 PM

MOst if not all spiders are do this on a default level. This tag doesn't hurt your page. Some will argue its worthless because you're not going to force a spider to do something it's not programmed to do, but some will argue they have good success with it. It's a tag I myself got into the habit of using while at SEO Inc, and just continue to use it, becuase it doesn't cause harm. If it doesn't cause harm, and MIGHT and a small amount of benefit, why not use it.

Its not a tag that is a MUST HAVE type of tag.

bubbles

11-03-2005, 12:40 PM

Thanks for your reply.

Would I just place it somewhere in the header of the page?

Can I also ask, because as I say I'm a bit confused - why is it ok to put this tag in when I thought it was a command to actually stop the search engines spidering that page?

If you've answered and I've not understood please accept my apologies for being dumb :confused:

Denise

Rob

11-03-2005, 03:23 PM

Hi

it would go in your <HEAD> tag with the other meta tags.

this is an alternative to using robots.txt, or could be used in conjunction with it.

It's good for excluding content on a page by page basis, and in my experience having "index,follow" doesn't help much, where it does help is in the exclusion of content.

SanDiegoSEO

11-03-2005, 03:29 PM

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

That says to index and to follow. No excluding there.

meta name= "robots" content= "noindex,nofollow">

That tag tells them not to index or follow links.

bubbles

11-03-2005, 03:29 PM

Thanks

I'll have to think about whether it's worth my while going through everything and using it.

Denise