Them Wierd META tags.

[The Armpit]

I was browsing recently and (as usual) looking at the source of the pages. I came accross an interesting META tag in the head section that looked like this:

<META NAME="robots" CONTENT="index">

Now, I have seen this tag before on other sites, and it always has the Index attribute in it, but lots of other times it has other ones. I just put this tag in my page because it seems to be one of the tags that your just supposed to put their. But upon seeing this tag again, I realised i have no idea what-so-ever what it does. Doe anyone know? :banana:

[Shalome]

Meta tags are largely for search engines to gather information about your site. Here's a rather silly but still informative (skip all the parts about cheese, which is about the first half of the essay) intro to meta tags:

http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/96/51/index2a.html

Webmonkey's definition:

Meta information means "information about information." In HTML, meta tags describe the content of the document in which they're written. Meta tags have two possible attributes: <META HTTP-EQUIV="name" CONTENT="content"> and <META NAME="name" CONTENT="content">. Meta tags with an HTTP-EQUIV attribute are analogous to HTTP headers that can control the action of browsers. Meta tags with a NAME attribute are used primarily by indexing and searching tools. These tools can gather meta information in order to sort and classify Web pages. One way to help your document show up more frequently in search engines and directories is to use the META NAME attribute to set keywords that will pull up your site when someone does a search for those words.

[The Armpit]

Shal, i know what META tags mean and there properties and the like, i just dont know what THAT one (robots) means :D

[TotalRecall]

W3Schools doesn't have anything like that in their meta tags section (http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_meta.asp).

[Canis Lupus]

That meta tag simply tells robots (search engine spiders, etc) to index that particular page where that meta tag appears, and whether or not to follow the links in that particular page or not.

Note that this only works on very few friendly robots (the ones from major search engines like google, altavista, lycos, etc) ... some robots used by spam companies and email collectors simply ignore this tag.

I myself don't use this particular tag because of that particular reason. I instead put a robots.txt in my root directory with the following contents.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /restricted folder 1/
Disallow: /restricted folder 2/
Disallow: /restricted folder 3/
Disallow: /restricted folder 4/


And since robots spider a particular page by default, putting a meta tag asking the robot to index it is, well, redundant, unless you don't want them to follow the links in a specific page :)

The only practical use I can see for this one is when you don't want a robot to spider that particular page, but as I said, only a few robots actually follow this meta tag - that is why you don't see a lot of people using them coz it often proves useless.

Read this for more explanation on robot meta tags:
http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/meta-user.html

And then go here for a further explanation of the robots.txt file:
http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/exclusion-admin.html
http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/norobots.html

[The Armpit]

Argh i see, thanks laggy :D