Meet the family: Meta name= “robots”

I offered you so many things to eat – PR Bar, optimizer beer, Energy drinks and what not. But did you ever wonder, what do Search Engine bots eat? Yes they love eating fresh content & HTML on your website; but there are few things on your website, that you never want to feed bots with like – flash, silly javascripts, duplicate content, affiliate links (that pass link juice) etc. So how do you stop these dumb bots – Simple, by defining robots meta tag values:

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I just happened to stumble upon this cute flicker pic of five robots, I could relate to Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask & Altavista. So I just simply used my paint brush and wrote their names accordingly. Looks so cool to me ! 

And now that you have met the bot family, let’s discuss different values you can serve to these witty Search Engine bots:

1. Index: Allows bots to index the page. This a default value, you need not define it on all the pages.
2. Noindex: Search Engines will not index the page and hence the page will not appear in its results.
3. None: It’s like shortcut for noindex, nofollow. “None” gives strict instruction to search engines – Don’t do any thing with the page at all.
4. Follow: Tell search engine bots, to follow the links on the page and take them as a vote to the linking website ie. pass the link juice.
5. Nofollow: Gives strict instruction to bots not to follow any links at all.
6. Noarchive: Stops paparazzi bots from showing the cached version of the page in its reults.
7. Nocache: Prevents MSN/Live to show the cached version of the page in its results.
8. Nosnippet: Stops the bots from not only reflecting a snippet of the page in search results but also doesn’t let them cache the page.
9. Noodp: Makes sure that search engines don’t use the description of the containing page in DMOZ as the snippet for your page in the search results.
10. Noydir: Works just like noodp, but used exclusively for Yahoo!

BTW, you may also want to go through our comprehensive article on Working with robots.txt file. I hope you enjoyed the post. Cheers! 
Image credit: flickr.