Robots.txt and meta robots tags
Webmasters and search engine optimization firms use the robots.txt or rather meta robots tags to give instructions to crawlers traversing and indexing a website. They inform the search spider what to do with a certain web page, such as not crawling it at all or crawling it but not including it in Google’s index. Using them in conjunction with nofollow tags is frequently a good idea.
What exactly is robots.txt?
Robots.txt, which stands for The Robots Exclusion Protocol, is a text file used to guide bots or ‘crawlers’ on how to index pages on a website. Search engine optimization firms who utilize robots.txt properly can tell crawlers what pages to visit on a website and offer you control over how your site is searched.
These are some of them:
Noindex: This allows crawling but not indexing of the page. It also informs search engines that the page should be deleted if it is presently indexed.
Disallow: Prevents the page from being crawled or indexed.
Nofollow: This tag instructs search engines not to follow the page’s links. Because this is such a vital aspect of search engine optimization, we’ve gone through Nofollow tags in further depth. ‘Follow’ is the inverse of this directive.
Nocache: Informs search engines that they should not keep a copy of the web page in their cache.
Go to www.yourdomain.com/robots.txt to examine your site’s robots.txt file.
What are meta robots tags, and how do I use them?
In addition to the robots.txt file, meta robots tags are used to focus on certain pages rather than the entire website. With a header-level directive, meta robots tags allow you to manage the behavior of search bots at the page level. This allows consumers ‘fine grain control’ over a website, according to Google.
It would look like this in code:
<head>
<meta name=’ROBOTS’ content=”NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW” / >
</head>
