Google SEO: Robots Meta Tag
OK – So I’ve theorised about the Title Element, the Meta Description Tag and the pointless (IMO) Meta Keywords tag.
The only other Meta Tag I am interested in, generally, is when I am trying to control which pages (at a page level) are indexed, or which external links are to be counted by Google as links – useful to stay within their guidelines in some cases. The Robots Meta Tag;
<meta name="robots" content="index, nofollow" />
I use the above meta tag and instructions to tell Google to index the page but not to count any links on the page going to EXTERNAL sites (EDIT nofollow on al links on the page!) . There are various instructions you can utilise but remember Google by default will index and follow links, so need to include that as a command – you can leave the robots meta out completely and probably should if you don’t have a clue.
Valid values for the “CONTENT” attribute are: “INDEX“, “NOINDEX“, “FOLLOW“, “NOFOLLOW“. Pretty self explanatory – If you want to find out more about this tag, visit http://www.robotstxt.org/meta.htm
I’ve included the robots meta tag as this is one of only 3 meta tags / head elements I am interested in when it comes to Google. But it is for the Head Section, generally, for me.
- Title Element – Important – Unique
- Meta Description (optional but advisable in most cases) – Unique
- Robots Meta Tag (optional) – Be Careful
These tips are part of our no FUD on site optimisation tips July – one seo tip a day, but only the stuff you can actually use and should be considering on your site.
These tags go in the HEAD section of a HTML page and represent the only tags for Google I care about. Everything else is quite unnecessary and very well pointless (for Google optimisation, anyway).
If you are interested in using methods like on-page robots instructions and the robots.txt file to control which pages get indexed by Google and how Google treats them, Sebastian knows a lot more than me 
Written by Shaun Anderson
Hi there, I thought that all these meta keywords – description are useless??
No the Meta Keywords are next to useless for me – but the meta description is very important to me.
hi shaun
Im not sure if ive got meta tags on my site as i was advised they are old hat – is this true ?
If tags added to my site (ive no idea how to do this ) would it affect its current performance ?
Martin
Howdy Martin you’re learning how to get a hold of me
You’ve got nothing to worry about. Though I would modify your page titles a bit looking at them. Don’t repeat the keywords as much.
PM Alan for help.
You don’t need to worry.
Now, we need to add one more tag to avoid duplicate content, which is recently announce by three giants, google, microsoft and yahoo.