--- title: "Meta Robots" description: "Meta robots is an HTML meta tag that provides page-level instructions to search engine crawlers about indexing, following links, caching, and displaying a page in search results." category: "SEO Crawling & Indexation" date: "2026-03-05" url: "https://getbeast.io/glossary/meta-robots/" type: "glossary" --- # Meta Robots **Category:** SEO Crawling & Indexation | **Updated:** 2026-03-05 Meta robots is an HTML meta tag that provides page-level instructions to search engine crawlers about indexing, following links, caching, and displaying a page in search results. --- ## What Is the Meta Robots Tag? The meta robots tag is placed in a page's `<head>` and provides instructions to crawlers. Common values include `noindex`, `nofollow`, `noarchive`, `nosnippet`, and `noimageindex`. Multiple values can be combined: `<meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow">`. ## Why Meta Robots Matters Meta robots gives you **page-level control over search engine behavior** that robots.txt cannot provide. While robots.txt controls crawling at the URL pattern level, meta robots controls indexing and behavior on a per-page basis. ## How to Use Meta Robots Add the tag to your page's `<head>`. Use `noindex` for pages that should not appear in search. Use `nofollow` on pages with untrusted outbound links. The default (no tag) is `index, follow`. For non-HTML files, use the `X-Robots-Tag` HTTP header. --- ## Related Terms - [Noindex](/glossary/noindex/) - [Nofollow](/glossary/nofollow/) - [Robots.txt](/glossary/robots-txt/) - [Indexation](/glossary/indexation/) --- *Part of the [GetBeast SEO Glossary](/glossary/). Visit [GetBeast.io](https://getbeast.io) for professional SEO and log analysis tools.*