---
title: "Meta robots"
description: "The meta robots tag tells search engine crawlers whether to index a page and follow its links. Learn the index, noindex, follow and nofollow directives."
url: "https://nodea.io/en/glossary/meta-robots"
lang: "en"
updated: "2026-07-13"
---

# Meta robots

> The meta robots tag is an HTML element placed in a page's head that tells search engine crawlers whether to index that page and follow its links. It is a precise tool for controlling SEO.

The **meta robots** tag is an HTML element placed in the *\<head\>* of a document that gives search engine crawlers instructions about that specific page: whether it should be indexed and whether the crawler should follow the links it contains. It is one of the most important tools for precisely controlling [indexing](https://nodea.io/en/glossary/page-indexing) in SEO.

## How the meta robots tag works

The tag takes one or more directives in its *content* attribute. The most important are: **index** / **noindex** (whether the page should appear in search results) and **follow** / **nofollow** (whether the crawler should follow the links and pass authority to them). By default, when the tag is absent, crawlers assume *index, follow*. Additional values are available, such as *noarchive* (no cached copy), *nosnippet* or *max-snippet*, which control how the page is presented in the [SERP](https://nodea.io/en/glossary/serp). The same directives can also be sent via the X-Robots-Tag HTTP header, which is useful for non-HTML files such as PDFs.

## Practical application

The meta robots tag is used to keep pages with no search value out of the index: internal search result pages, the cart, login pages, print versions, form thank-you pages and duplicate variants. The *noindex, follow* combination lets you hide a page from results while still letting authority flow through its links to the rest of the site.

It is important not to confuse meta robots with the [robots.txt](https://nodea.io/en/glossary/robots-txt) file: for a crawler to read a [noindex](https://nodea.io/en/glossary/noindex) directive, it must be able to reach the page, so blocking the same path in robots.txt means the tag will never be read. Alongside meta robots, the [canonical](https://nodea.io/en/glossary/canonical-tag) tag is often used to indicate the preferred version of a page.

### How is the meta robots tag different from robots.txt?

The robots.txt file controls whether a crawler is allowed to fetch a given path and works at the whole-server level. The meta robots tag works at the level of a single page and controls its indexing and link following — but the crawler must first be able to reach the page to read it. That is why a page blocked in robots.txt cannot be reliably marked noindex.

## Related

- [Noindex](https://nodea.io/en/glossary/noindex)
- [robots.txt](https://nodea.io/en/glossary/robots-txt)
- [Nofollow attribute](https://nodea.io/en/glossary/nofollow-attribute)
- [Page indexing](https://nodea.io/en/glossary/page-indexing)
- [Canonical tag](https://nodea.io/en/glossary/canonical-tag)

---

Languages: [pl](https://nodea.pl/pl/slownik-pojec/meta-robots.md)  
Site index: [llms.txt](https://nodea.io/en/llms.txt)