Matt Cutts of Google posted a blog entry asking SEOs how they want Google to handle the NOINDEX meta tag. If you use the NOINDEX meta tag now, Google won’t show the page in any way in the Google index — not even a “link only” listing.

Matt asks SEOs if this is what they want and the poll currently shows us that yes, SEOs want it this way. Here are the current results, but the results may change over the course of the week:

How should Google treat the NOINDEX meta tag?

• 240 say “Don’t show a page at all.”
• 24 say “Find some middle ground.”
• 23 say “Show a link to the page.”

Google Explains The NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW, NOARCHIVE & NOSNIPPET META Tags from last year has more about the various meta commands Google allows, and Meta Robots Tag 101: Blocking Spiders, Cached Pages & More goes into depth about how each feature is used for particular search engines.

Related Topics: Google: SEO | SEO: Blocking Spiders

About The Author: Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here. For more background information on Barry, see his full bio over here. See more articles by Barry Schwartz