Tag, You're It!
When the spiders come crawling through your Web pages, will they find what they need to index the pages properly? They will if you're using meta commands, or tags, correctly. Meta commands are used on individual Web pages to "modify how search engine spiders behave," says Medium Blue's Scott Buresh in a recent MarketingProfs article. Here's Buresh's list of some of the more popular meta commands:
<meta name="robots" content="index">. Although this meta command is one of the most common ones used, it's also the least necessary because the engines will index the page by default anyway. Use <meta name="robots" content="noindex"> if you don't want the page indexed.
<meta name="robots" content="follow">. The "follow" command is also unnecessary, because all search engines are going to follow the links on a page as this command requests, unless otherwise directed.
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow">. " 'Noindex' and 'nofollow' are powerful tags—and in combination, they can make a page and the subsequent pages to which it links invisible to nearly all search engines," notes Buresh.
<meta name="robots" content="noarchive">. The "noarchive" tag can be used when there is content on your website that is time-sensitive and you don't want search engine spiders to cache it.
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