NOINDEX or NOINDEX,FOLLOW

[Peter264]

Currently we employ this tag on pages we want to keep out of the index but want link juice to flow through them:

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX">

Is the tag above the same as:

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX,FOLLOW">

Or should we be specifying the "FOLLOW" in our tag?

[mad2k]

Hello again,

They are the same.

And I assume that interpretation is the same because default state is:

**<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="ALL">  **that means index, follow

and you can decompose every tag to parts:

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX">

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="FOLLOW">

and that tells robot to noindex, but do follow is default so if you don't use this tag robot will follow anyway.

Marek:-)

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/03/using-robots-meta-tag.html

[Peter264]

Thank you for your reply.  I think you may have misunderstood my question a little.  I was asking if...

This tag:

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX">

is the same as this tag:

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX,FOLLOW">

?

[mad2k]

Hi Peter,

Read an Google article first: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=93710

and then you can read http://www.robotstxt.org/meta.html

Take in the consideration that many robots especially malware simply can ignore that tag. So on the end your site can appear in SERP's despite you use "noindex". More information about indexing: http://www.robotstxt.org/faq/indexing.html

When you think about googlebot it respects "noindex" tag. The best place to tag is section. Make sure that your robots.txt doesn't block a robots

User-agent: *

Disallow: /

block all robots to enter the site, so you can use:

User-agent: *

Disallow:

more: http://www.robotstxt.org/robotstxt.html

Take Care

Marek