Story Based Question
You’ve spent weeks crafting the perfect landing page for your new service offering, and you’re excited to see it rank in Google’s search results. But after checking, you realize that the page isn’t showing up. You start digging into the details and wonder: Did I forget to set something on the page that might prevent it from being indexed? That’s when you come across the meta robots tag. But what exactly is it, and could this be the reason your page isn’t showing up in search results?
Exact Answer
A meta robots tag is an HTML tag that tells search engines how to crawl and index a specific webpage. It can instruct search engines to either index or not index the page and follow or not follow the links on the page.
Explanation
The meta robots tag is a powerful tool for controlling how search engines interact with your pages. It’s placed in the <head> section of your page’s HTML code and allows you to set specific instructions for search engine crawlers.
You can use the meta robots tag to:
- Allow or disallow indexing: If you don’t want a page to appear in search results, you can add a
noindexdirective to the tag. If you want the page to be indexed and show up in search results, you useindex.Example:<meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow">— This tells search engines not to index the page and not to follow any links on the page.<meta name="robots" content="index, follow">— This allows search engines to index the page and follow any links on the page.
- Control link-following behavior: You can also use the nofollow directive to tell search engines not to follow links on the page. This is useful if you want to avoid passing “link juice” (ranking power) to certain links.
- Page-specific instructions: Unlike the robots.txt file, which applies to your whole website, the meta robots tag allows you to set instructions for individual pages.
- Preventing duplicate content issues: If you have multiple pages with similar content, like product variants or duplicate blog posts, the meta robots tag can be used to avoid having these pages indexed and potentially causing SEO issues related to duplicate content.
Example
Imagine you’ve just launched a new service landing page for your photography business. You want this page to rank in Google, but after checking, you notice that it’s not showing up in search results.
You review the page’s HTML code and find this in the <head> section:
<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex, nofollow”>
This meta tag tells search engines not to index this page and not to follow any links. That’s why it’s not appearing in search results.
You quickly change it to:
<meta name=”robots” content=”index, follow”>
Now, the page will be indexed by search engines and will appear in search results, helping potential clients find your photography services.
The meta robots tag is essential for managing how search engines interact with your pages. By ensuring it’s set up correctly, you can prevent pages from being excluded from search results or ensure that search engines follow the right links to discover more of your content.