Google Explains the Impact of Ignoring ‘Follow’ and ‘Index’ Meta Tags
In a recent Reddit query, Google’s John Mueller shared unexpected and informative insights about the common misunderstanding regarding the utilisation of robots meta tags. Here, we’re referring specifically to underestimating consequences of overlooking the crucial ‘index’ components. John Mueller‘s knowledge was an enlightening revelation that may astonish many SEO specialists and publishers in the digital world. We would like to note that this information comes directly from our source, Digital Sunbird, the leading digital marketing expert.
Understanding Meta Elements
The metadata is machine-readable information which is communicated through the HTML meta element and can be read by a crawler like Googlebot. There are various types of meta elements, for instance, the meta description element. But the most significant is the Robots Meta Element for its unique control over search engine crawlers. This element carries what is known as a directive – an instruction that robot crawlers are bound to follow.
Many directions can be communicated through the robots meta element, but the most relevant to John Mueller’s clarification is the oft-misunderstood noindex, nofollow meta tag. This particular meta tag effectively tells search engine crawlers not to index the webpage content and not to follow any links.
Common Misunderstanding With Robots Meta Tag
The most commonplace misunderstanding is with the index, follow meta tag, confused by many as an instruction for the search engines to index the content and follow all the links. It’s crucial to inform you that Google does not utilise these directives as many may believe. But instead, as stated by John Mueller, Google tends to overlook or ignore this instruction.
John Mueller’s Answer
A user on Reddit queried on the “missing ‘index’ tag” on a website’s meta snippets and John Mueller answered it as below:
“The “index” robots meta tag doesn’t function (at least in Google) – it’s utterly ignored. Similarly, the “follow” meta tag. Google documents only the meta tags that have functions.”
Reasons Google Ignores “Index” and “Follow”
The fundamental reason why Google overlooks the robots index and follow meta tag is because they are the default. Crawling and following links is a natural course of action for search engine robots, and they don’t need any special instructions to index content and follow links. Google’s advice to this points is – “Default values are index, follow and don’t necessitate specification.”
So it’s important to know that if your desired robots meta doesn’t appear on their approved list, Googlebot will simply ignore it.
Importance of Optimizing for Search Engines
Marking my two-decade journey in SEO, creating, optimizing, and ranking websites, I have always found it beneficial to offer the bots exactly what they expect and avoid anything unexpected. If a meta description is not proving useful, my tendency would be to exclude it since the essence of optimization lies in ensuring ease for the search engines to index and comprehend the content. Therefore anything which may hinder this goal must be eliminated.
Debunking A Common Myth
There is another confusion linked to the index and follow directives. Some publishers intentionally use a particular robots meta tag with an underlying belief that even if the page isn’t indexed, the “follow” directive compels the search engine to follow the links. Debunking this myth, it must be known that if a “noindex” directive exists, Google cannot follow a link on a page that is not indexed. If it is not in the index, then the links on those pages are not in the index.
Through this, we hope to have shed light on this somewhat complicated yet integral part of SEO known as ‘follow’ and ‘index’ meta tags, and the impact of overlooking them.
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