is the robots meta tag a guarantee that the page will/won't be indexed

[spewn]

using this tag:

<meta name="robots" CONTENT="index,nofollow">

mean that definitely the page will be indexed, but the links won't be followed, no matter what search engine? or does it only matter for the SE's that read meta tags...

- g

 

[ChrisHunt]

It's a request for that to happen - there's no guarantee that SEs will honour it. The same can be said for robots.txt files. That said, I believe the ones that matter - Google, Yahoo, MSN - will abide by such instructions.

-- Chris Hunt
Webmaster & Tragedian
Extra Connections Ltd

 

[johnwm]

The 'robots' meta name and the robots.txt file are for the benefit of the search engines, to save them searching down unnecessary paths. I doubt if the 'spamfinder' engines would even look at any restrictions you might try and impose - if it's linked, they will spider it.

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