Google Clarifies the Functionality of the Index, Follow Meta Tag

In an insightful discussion on Reddit, Google’s John Mueller delves into the intricacies of a frequently employed meta robots tag and sheds light on the consequences of its absence. Mueller’s response, although logically consistent and well-documented, might challenge the expectations of numerous publishers and SEO professionals.

Meta Elements and Their Roles The HTML meta element serves as a conduit for metadata, conveying machine-readable information for crawlers like Googlebot to interpret. While various meta elements, such as the meta description element, exist, the Robots Meta Element holds a unique position as it wields control over search engine crawlers.

The information conveyed through the robots meta tag is termed a directive, implying that robot crawlers are bound to adhere to the instructions specified in the robots meta tag. Among the myriad of directions available through the robots meta, the focus here is on a specific meta tag that John Mueller addresses – the noindex, nofollow meta tag:

This particular meta tag explicitly instructs search engine crawlers to refrain from indexing the content on the webpage and to abstain from following any links contained within.

Conversely, a widely encountered meta tag instructs search engines to index the content and pursue all links:

Despite the prevalence of the above meta tag, there exists a notable degree of misunderstanding surrounding its application. Some assert that since Google supports nofollow, it implies support for the follow directive as well. Numerous authoritative websites even claim that Google utilizes the meta robots index, follow meta tag.

However, as elucidated by John Mueller in his response, this isn’t the actual interpretation or implementation of these directives by Google. The nuances of how Google employs these directives might challenge some preconceived notions in the SEO community.