Web page meta tags

META Tags can be used for excluding content from search engine crawlers. It is also used when you cannot upload a robots.txt file. Its purpose is to keep content out of search engine indexes.  They should be added between the HEAD section of your page(s) in question:

(no)index determines whether the crawler should index this page.
Possible values: “noindex” or “index”

(no)follow determines whether the crawler should follow links on this page and crawl them. Possible values: “nofollow” and “follow.”

Here are a few examples:
1) This disallows both indexing and following of links by a crawler on that specific page:
<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,nofollow” />

2) This disallows indexing of the page, but lets the crawler go on and follow/crawl links contained within it:
<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,follow” />

3) This allows indexing of the page, but instructs the crawler to not crawl links contained within it:
<meta name=”robots” content=”index,nofollow” />

4) Finally, there is a shorthand way of declaring 1) above (don’t index nor follow links on page):
<meta name=”robots” content=”none”>

If this meta tag is missing, or if there is no content, or the robot terms are not specified, then the robot terms will be assumed to be “index, follow” (e.g. “all”). If the keyword all is found in the robots terms list it overrides all other values. That is, a robots terms that is “nofollow, all, noindex, nofollow”, would effectively be “all”.