WEB1038 - The <meta name="robots"> tag contains invalid values

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A <meta name="robots"> tag includes one or both of the attribute values nofollow or noindex.

Explanation

Incorrectly using the attribute values nofollow or noindex in the <meta name="robots"> tag may significantly change the search engine results for your site.

Other valid attribute values for the <meta name="robots"> tag include the following:

  • follow   Follow the link and analyze the target page. This is default behavior and can be omitted.

  • index   Index the page. This is default behavior and can be omitted.

  • noodp   Do not use the Open Directory Project to create content descriptions.

  • noydir   Do not use Yahoo Directory to create content descriptions.

  • noarchive   Do not allow search engines to display a cached version of the content.

  • cache   Allow search engines to display a cached version of the content.

  • nocache   Do not allow search engines to display a cached version of the content.

Details

Robots.txt is the file that search engines use to determine which pages they should crawl. Make sure that you use the nofollow and noindex attributes correctly in the <meta name="robots"> tag. The nofollow attribute instructs a search engine to index the content of the current page but to ignore the targets of hyperlinks on that page. The noindex attribute instructs a search engine to ignore the contents of the current page and continue indexing the other pages in the site.

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