An Introduction to Meta Tags: Part III
Have you ever wanted to keep search engine crawlers from crawling certain pages, or just a single page on your website? Well thanks to robot tags, it’s as easy as heating up leftovers. Robot tags allow you to specify to search engine crawlers that you do not want a page, or pages on your website indexed by search engines.
Similar to implementing other types of meta tags, as discussed in Part II of this article, you won’t break the bank to do it.
Begin by deciding for what pages you’ll be implementing the robots tag. You could implement it on a single page, or you can implement it on a series of pages. Whatever you decide, go to the file or page that will allow you to edit the coding for the page of pages you want to implement the robots tag on.
Once you’re in the file or page, scroll down and find coding that begins with <head> or <head + (a few words that don’t make much sense to you)> and ends in </head>.
Now that you’ve found that piece of coding, you’ll want to copy and paste the following below the beginning (the <head> part) of the strip of coding you just found.
<title>Edit this with the page title</title>
<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex”>
Don’t be fooled into thinking you need to do the opposite of this to actually get your page indexed. That’s just a myth that believe it or not, people actually fall for. My biggest recommendation if you are trying to get indexed is to read Part I and Part II of this article.
Getting back to the point, this tag should work with all major and most minor search engines. If you got lost during this tutorial, there are plugins that will help you implement robot tags. I haven’t used these plugins, so I couldn’t stand by them, but they are out there. Doing a quick search, I found this one on the WordPress website, http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/robots-meta.
I have found that doing things manually always works, so why waist your time playing with plugins, when dealing with something that is so easy to do. If you have any questions, feel free to comment them below, and I, or other people familiar with robot tags, would be happy to answer them.