What are robots meta tags (index, noindex)?

Robots meta tags are HTML instructions for search engines that specify how exactly to index a particular page.

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#Main tags:

#1. <meta name="robots" content="index">

Allows indexing the page. (The default, if the meta tag is absent.)

#2. <meta name="robots" content="noindex">

Prohibits indexing. The page will not appear in search results.

#3. follow / nofollow

• follow allows following the links on the page (even if the page itself is noindex).
• nofollow prohibits it.

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#Examples of robots meta tags:

• <meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow"> Do not index, do not follow links.
• <meta name="robots" content="index, follow"> Index and follow links (the default).

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#Why use it:

• Hide duplicates, carts, login pages;
• Avoid giving SEO weight to low-value pages;
• Control indexing without robots.txt.

This is a targeted way to control a page's visibility in search engines.