The meta robots tag is a single <meta name="robots" content="..."> line in a page's <head> that carries instructions for search engine crawlers. Most people only ever encounter it through one directive, noindex, but it supports at least seven, each controlling a different piece of how a page is crawled, indexed, or displayed in results. Knowing the full set matters because several of them get added by SEO plugins without anyone reviewing what they actually do.
The Directives, and What Each One Actually Controls
noindex- don't show this page in search results at all. Covered in full in our noindex tag guide.nofollow- don't pass ranking credit through links on this page. Page-wide version of the link-level attribute covered in our nofollow links guide.noarchive- don't keep a cached copy of the page available.nosnippet- don't show a text preview, video preview, or rich result under this page in search results, just the bare title and URL.max-snippet:[number]- cap the text preview to a specific character count, or0for no snippet at all.noimageindex- don't index images on this page for Google Images.none- shorthand fornoindex, nofollowtogether.
Multiple values can be combined in one tag, comma-separated: <meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow">.
Where This Actually Goes Wrong
nosnippet and max-snippet:0 silently kill click-through rate. A page can rank perfectly well and still show as a bare, unhelpful title-and-URL in results if one of these is set, usually by an SEO plugin's default "prevent content scraping" option rather than a deliberate choice. The page isn't missing from search, it just looks worse than every competing result underneath it, which is the kind of problem that never shows up in a rankings report.
none is a stronger claim than it looks. Because it bundles noindex and nofollow together, a page tagged none for a narrow reason (say, keeping a thank-you page out of results) also strips ranking credit from every link on that page, including links back to the rest of the site.
How to Check What You're Actually Setting
- View source and search for
name="robots", not just what your SEO plugin's settings screen claims is applied, plugin defaults and per-page overrides can disagree. - Check for
nosnippetormax-snippetspecifically if a page ranks but its search result looks unusually bare compared to competitors, that's the tell. - Confirm
X-Robots-Tagisn't set separately in your server or CDN config, conflicting with what the page's own<meta>tag says.
The Fast Way to Check Yours
Reviewing every directive on every page by hand doesn't scale past a handful of URLs. AuditCrow's free scan flags robots directives automatically as part of its technical SEO review, alongside the rest of the fundamentals in our technical SEO checklist.