May 17, 2012

Robots.txt Meta Tag Versus X-Robots-Tag HTTP Header .htaccess

It has become common practice to implement robot.txt files to prevent the search engine spiders from crawling your webpage and having it show up in the search engine results page (SERP). Unfortunately, robots.txt does not prevent your site from showing up in the search engine results. That means your web page is passing on link juice that is unused and wasted. It does prevent your site from being indexed, but it could show a result in the SERP’s. It will not have a description of your site, only a URL and strange title.

Matt Cutt’s from Google explains this in his video

A better way to prevent a web site from being crawled and indexed in the search engines is to use a robots meta tag a X robots-tag http header .htaccess file to your website.

Meta Tag
Adding the met tag < name=”robots” content=”noindex,nofollow”> lets the search engine’s spider know not to index or follow your website and show it in the search results. This is a useful snippet and can be very beneficial. The downside to this is that you have to hand code this into every page on your web site. This can be impossible for larger sites with tens of thousands of pages.

X robots-tag http header .htaccess
The new tag allows you to create a HTTP header called X-Robots-Tag and set the value as you would the meta robots tag value. This will set up the file for the entire site making your life much easier. So, if your site is running on Apache, and mod_headers is enabled (it usually is), you could add the following single line to your .htaccess file: Header set X-Robots-Tag “noindex, nofollow”

VN:F [1.9.17_1161]
Rating: 0.0/10 (0 votes cast)

Related posts:

  1. Tips for Header Tags and Page Title Keywords for the Search Engine Spider
  2. PageTitle, Meta Description, and Meta Keywords Tags for SEO
  3. Heading Tags HTML can be in any order – H1 H2 H3 H4
  4. Google Updates Search Results Page
About bosmol

Brandon Leibowitz is a Social Media fanatic. His blog, Bosmol, is based on trending stories on various topics related to social media, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Google Plus, Internet Marketing, Social Bookmarking, Smartphones, SEO, and many other topics. Established in Los Angeles, California in 2007. Subscribe to us to receive the latest news and updates first. Please feel free to comment back.

  • http://www.1-play-online-bingo.com/ Abi COX

    Undoubtfully interesting story u have here. I’d like to read something more about this matter. Thanx for sharing that material.

    VA:F [1.9.17_1161]
    Rating: 0.0/10 (0 votes cast)
  • http://www.cnatrainingblog.com CNA Training

    It’s posts like this that keep me coming back and checking this site regularly, thanks for the info!

    VA:F [1.9.17_1161]
    Rating: 0.0/10 (0 votes cast)
  • http://genericwpthemes.com WP Themes

    Nice post and this mail helped me alot in my college assignement. Thanks you as your information.

    VA:F [1.9.17_1161]
    Rating: 0.0/10 (0 votes cast)
  • http://buildasitebookmarks.com Sonia

    PageRank is an algorithim google invented that assesses the strength of a website. The algorithim evaluates a site on a scale of n/a to 10 with 0 being the lowest/weakest and 10 being the highest/strongest. We can check our site’s rank by using a checker pagerank tool.

    VA:F [1.9.17_1161]
    Rating: 0.0/10 (0 votes cast)
  • http://buildasitebookmarks.com Miss Sonia

    PageRank is an algorithim google invented that assesses the strength of a website. The algorithim evaluates a site on a scale of n/a to 10 with 0 being the lowest/weakest and 10 being the highest/strongest. We can check our site’s rank by using a pagerank checker tool.

    VA:F [1.9.17_1161]
    Rating: 0.0/10 (0 votes cast)
  • http://www.xn--totschlger-w5a.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=152948Result:chosennicknamefacialcleanser;captcharecognized;loggedin;success-postedtoNieh?ggrPvE; facial cleanser

    this is really cool, I like here!

    VA:F [1.9.17_1161]
    Rating: 0.0/10 (0 votes cast)
  • http://durable-goods.blogspot.com/ Durable Goods

    Robots meta tags is followed worldwide and even search engines pay importance to this tag only.

    VA:F [1.9.17_1161]
    Rating: 0.0/10 (0 votes cast)
  • http://www.completelyfreegroceries.org Steve

    Can you give an example of an X robots-tag? This code is added to htaccess?

    Thanks

    Steve´s last blog ..Free Printable Grocery Coupon Codes

    VA:F [1.9.17_1161]
    Rating: 0.0/10 (0 votes cast)

Switch to our mobile site