Google Explains The NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW, NOARCHIVE & NOSNIPPET META Tags

The Google Blog has a basic but clear explanation of the robots exclusion protocol. In this blog post, Google explained how the NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW, NOARCHIVE and NOSNIPPET META tags function. In short: NOINDEX tag tells Google not to index a specific page NOFOLLOW tag tells Google not to follow the links on a specific page […]

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The Google Blog has a basic but clear explanation of the robots exclusion protocol. In this blog post, Google explained how the NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW, NOARCHIVE and NOSNIPPET META tags function. In short:

  • NOINDEX tag tells Google not to index a specific page
  • NOFOLLOW tag tells Google not to follow the links on a specific page
  • NOARCHIVE tag tells Google not to store a cached copy of your page
  • NOSNIPPET tag tells Google not to show a snippet (description) under your Google listing, it will also not show a cached link in the search results

About the author

Barry Schwartz
Staff
Barry Schwartz is a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry can be followed on Twitter here.

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