Google On Making Use Of Robots Meta Tags

Owing to Danny Sullivan’s post on how search engines handle meta tags, Google’s Vanessa Fox has written a post on how Google handles these tags.

For handling multiple content values Vanessa says:

We recommend that you place all content values in one meta tag. This keeps the meta tags easy to read and reduces the chance for conflicts. For instance:

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

If the page contains multiple meta tags of the same type, we will aggregate the content values. For instance, we will interpret

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

The same way as:

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

If content values conflict, we will use the most restrictive. So, if the page has these meta tags:

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

We will obey the NOINDEX value.  

For unnecessary content values, directing a robots meta tag specifically at Googlebot, casing and spacing and more read the full post.  

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