Meta Robots Directives
01 Definition
Meta Robots Directives meaning: The specific instructions, like noindex and nofollow, given through robots meta tags or headers.
Meta robots directives are the individual commands you set through the robots meta tag or X-Robots-Tag header. Common values include index, noindex, follow, nofollow, noarchive, nosnippet, and max-snippet. Each controls a specific crawler behavior, and several can be combined in one comma-separated instruction.
Also called
Why it matters
How Meta Robots Directives fits the work
Knowing the full set of directives lets you fine-tune how pages appear in results, from hiding snippets to limiting cached copies, beyond simple indexing.
In context
We set 'noindex, nofollow, noarchive' on the staging site so search engines would not index it, follow its links, or store a cached copy.
Practical note
Directives like nosnippet and max-snippet control result appearance, not indexing; combine values carefully, since a noindex overrides any indexing you also request.