{"id":283,"date":"2011-11-02T13:01:08","date_gmt":"2011-11-02T18:01:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.inmotionhosting.com\/support\/2011\/11\/02\/using-a-meta-tag-to-block-bots-from-indexing-a-webpage\/"},"modified":"2021-08-16T23:50:46","modified_gmt":"2021-08-17T03:50:46","slug":"using-a-meta-tag-to-block-bots-from-indexing-a-webpage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.inmotionhosting.com\/support\/website\/using-a-meta-tag-to-block-bots-from-indexing-a-webpage\/","title":{"rendered":"Using a META tag to block bots from indexing a webpage"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>You can use a specific &lt;META&gt; tag to tell search engine robots to not index \u00a0the content of a specific webpage. If you would like to find out how to stop bots from accessing your entire website please read our article on <a href=\"\/support\/website\/how-to-stop-search-engines-from-crawling-your-website\/\">creating a Robots.txt file<\/a>. You can also use the same tag to direct the bot to not scan the page for links to follow as well. This is a great tag to use if you are only trying to restrict one page on your website. Here&#8217;s a basic &#8216;no follow, no index&#8217; tag in HTML code:<\/p>\n<pre class=\"code_block\"> &lt;html&gt; &lt;head&gt; &lt;title&gt;...&lt;\/title&gt; &lt;META NAME=\"ROBOTS\" CONTENT=\"NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW\"&gt; &lt;\/head&gt; <\/pre>\n<p>There are three important peices of information you need to keep in mind when using the &lt;META&gt; tag:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Robots can ignore the tag if they wish. Typically, the bots that will ignore the &lt;META&gt; tag are rogue bots that are scanning the web for security vulnerablities to exploit or email harvesters used by spammers to grab email addresses.<\/li>\n<li>the NOFOLLOW directive only applies to links on the page. If the bot finds a link on another page without a NOFOLLOW it will still arrive on the page<\/li>\n<li>The NOFOLLOW in this tag is NOT the same as the rel=&#8221;nofollow&#8221; attribute you can set on an &lt;a href&gt; tag<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h2>Writing a ROBOTS META Tag<\/h2>\n<p>Like other &lt;META&gt; tags used in HTML they should be placed in the HEAD section of your HTML code just like in the example above.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p class=\"code_block\">&lt;META NAME=&#8221;ROBOTS&#8221; CONTENT=&#8221;NOINDEX, FOLLOW&#8221;&gt;<\/p>\n<p>So lets break the above example down further.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The &#8220;<strong>NAME<\/strong>&#8221; attribute will always be &#8220;<strong>ROBOTS<\/strong>&#8220;.\u00a0<\/li>\n<li>The &#8220;<strong>CONTENT<\/strong>&#8221; attribute can have four different values:<strong> &#8220;INDEX&#8221;, &#8220;NOINDEX&#8221;, &#8220;FOLLOW&#8221;, &#8220;NOFOLLOW&#8221;<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Multiple comma separated values are allowed but only certain combinations make sense. If there&#8217;s no &lt;META&gt; tag for ROBOTS present the default is &#8220;INDEX, FOLLOW&#8221; so there&#8217;s no need to specify that. You can have the following:<\/p>\n<pre class=\"code_block\"> &lt;META NAME=\"ROBOTS\" CONTENT=\"NOINDEX, FOLLOW\"&gt; &lt;META NAME=\"ROBOTS\" CONTENT=\"INDEX, NOFOLLOW\"&gt; &lt;META NAME=\"ROBOTS\" CONTENT=\"NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW\"&gt; <\/pre>\n<p>If you need further assistance with blocking robots from indexing your webpages, please read our article on\u00a0<a href=\"\/support\/website\/how-to-stop-search-engines-from-crawling-your-website\/\">How to stop Search Engines from crawling your Website<\/a>. If you need furhter assistance you can always <a href=\"\/support\/amp\/how-to-get-great-technical-support\/\">contact our support department<\/a> 24 hours a day 7 days a week.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>You can use a specific &lt;META&gt; tag to tell search engine robots to not index \u00a0the content of a specific webpage. If you would like to find out how to stop bots from accessing your entire website please read our article on creating a Robots.txt file. You can also use the same tag to direct<a class=\"moretag\" href=\"https:\/\/www.inmotionhosting.com\/support\/website\/using-a-meta-tag-to-block-bots-from-indexing-a-webpage\/\"> Read More ><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":56983,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4288],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-283","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-website"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.1.1 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Using a META tag to block bots from indexing a webpage | InMotion Hosting<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Learn how and when to use a META robots tag to block indexing of specific web pages.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, 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