Have you ever wondered what should a Google NOFOLLOW or NOSNIPPET tag mean? Are you sure you clearly know the functions and the differences between Google NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW, NOARCHIVE and NOSNIPPET meta tags?

From now and on you will not let these terms confuse you as Google has given a clear definition with examples to each of them.

So to be short, one generally would want to use

• NOINDEX tag on the page he doesn’t want to be indexed by Google
• NOFOLLOW tag on the page the links from which he doesn’t want to be followed by Googlebot
• NOARCHIVE tag on the page that you don’t wanted to be returned in Google SERPs as a cached page copy
• NOSNIPPET tag if you don’t want a snippet to be shown with the link to the page.

More detailed information could be found in the Robots Exclusion Protocol post of Official Google Blog. This helpful information will be of interest to any webmaster and will put the end to the debates around meta tags for Googlebot.

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.