How to Restrict Robots by making use of Meta Tags

Hope now every one will be well versed with the term robots.txt and have learnt their benefits and uses but the problem is not yet over, their might be some instance when many of you are unable to upload or control the robots.txt file at your website i.e. You may not have root access to your server. Here comes a Meta tag into action which will help you to keep your content out of search engine indexes and services. Like the /robots.txt, the robots META tag is a genuine standard. It originated from a "birds of a feather" meeting at a 1996 distributed indexing workshop, and was described in meeting notes.

You can use a special HTML tag to tell robots not to index the content of a page, and/or not scan it for links to follow. Like any Meta tag it should be placed in the head of an html page. Let clarify these by an example:

html
head
title.../title
META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW"
/head

(Note: In the tag above arrow mark is not used, please consider the same)

The robots attribute controls whether search engine spiders are allowed to index a page, or not, and whether they should follow links from a page, or not. The noindex value prevents a page from being indexed, and nofollow prevents links from being crawled. Meta tags are not the best option to prevent search engines from indexing content of your website. A more reliable and efficient method is the use of the Robots.txt file (robots exclusion standard). I.e. First preference should be given to robots.txt file, but if in case you are unable to upload robots.txt file in the root directory than only you should opt for using Meta tags to accomplish your task.

Googlebot interprets the following robots meta tag values:

1) NOINDEX - prevents the page from being included in the index.
2) NOFOLLOW - prevents Googlebot from following any links on the page. (Note that this is different from the link-level NOFOLLOW attribute, which prevents Googlebot from following an individual link.)
3) NOARCHIVE - prevents a cached copy of this page from being available in the search results.
4) NOSNIPPET - prevents a description from appearing below the page in the search results, as well as prevents caching of the page.
5) NOODP - blocks the Open Directory Project description of the page from being used in the description that appears below the page in the search results.
6) NONE - equivalent to "NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW".