{"id":100171,"date":"2010-05-14T22:30:09","date_gmt":"2010-05-14T14:30:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/seo-hacker.com\/?p=171"},"modified":"2023-02-07T15:53:18","modified_gmt":"2023-02-07T07:53:18","slug":"what-meta-robots-tag-are-for","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/seo-hacker.com\/what-meta-robots-tag-are-for\/","title":{"rendered":"What Meta Robots Tag Are For"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Meta<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

What are robots meta tags for?<\/h2>\n

Quick Answer:<\/strong><\/span> Robots meta tags are pieces of code that instruct search engine robots. These HTML snippets tell them what they can and cannot do on your page. It\u2019s a way of controlling how your pages are crawled and indexed, and how your content is displayed in the SERPs.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Overview<\/span><\/h2>\n

Have you ever wondered what the robots file in your website is for? Maybe you\u2019re using WordPress and you stumble upon this certain, unfamiliar tag that says <meta name =\u201drobots\u201d content=\u201dindex\u201d>.<\/span><\/p>\n

What the heck is it!? Is it a robot that automates your meta tags? Is it a piece of magical SEO tag? Does it summon the Google robot to your page?<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Meta robots tag is a tag that tells search engines what to follow and what not to follow. It is a piece of code in the <head> section of your webpage. It\u2019s a simple code that gives you the power to decide about what pages you want to hide from\u00a0search engine crawlers\u00a0and what pages you want them to index and look at.<\/span><\/p>\n

Another function of the meta robots tag is that it tells search engine crawlers<\/a> what links to follow and what links to stop with.<\/span><\/p>\n

When you have a lot of links going out of your website you should know that you lose some Google juice. And as a result, your page rank would lower down.<\/span><\/p>\n

So what you want to do is to keep that juice to yourself with some of the links\u2014and you tell the search engine crawlers not to follow the links going out of your site because in doing so, they will also take some of your Google juice with them.<\/span><\/p>\n

If you don\u2019t have a meta robots tag though, don\u2019t panic. By default, the search engine crawlers WILL index your site and WILL follow links.<\/span><\/p>\n

Let me make it clear that search engine crawlers following your links is not bad at all. Losing some of your juice won\u2019t affect your site much in exchange for getting the attention of other websites you\u2019re linking out to.<\/span><\/p>\n

In fact I don\u2019t recommend using nofollow at all if you don\u2019t have too much outbound links.<\/span><\/p>\n

Basically the meta robots tag can be cracked down to\u00a0four main functions for the search engine crawlers:<\/span><\/p>\n