What is a robots tag?
The robots tag is a piece of code that you add to the HTML of a Web page to give search engines such as Google instructions on how to treat that page. In other words, it tells the search engines whether or not to include the page in their index, and whether or not to follow the links on that page. This can be very useful if you have certain pages that you would rather not see appear in search results, for example, because they contain outdated information or because they are intended for internal use.
A common use of the robots tag is to indicate that a page should not be indexed. You do this with the instruction "noindex" within the robots tag. For example, if you have a temporary promotional page that you do not want to appear in search results, you can use the robots tag with "noindex" to ensure that search engines skip this page. In addition, you can use the "nofollow" instruction within the robots tag to indicate that search engines should not follow the links on that page. This can be useful if you have pages with links to partner websites, for example, that you don't want to promote through your own website.
The robots tag works closely with other SEO-related tags, such as the canonical tag. While the canonical tag tells search engines which version of a page is preferred for duplicate content, the robots tag determines whether a page may be indexed at all. Together, they help give search engines clear and precise instructions, helping to make your Web site easier to find and more targeted. For example, if you have a page that should not be indexed but has a canonical tag, the robots tag gives precedence to the "noindex" instruction, preventing the page from appearing in search results. This allows you to maintain control over which parts of your website are visible to search engines and which are not, which is essential to a well-executed SEO strategy.
