The Meta Robots Tag Generator helps you create the correct robots meta tag for your web page without manually editing HTML. You can choose how search engines should treat your page and generate a ready-to-use tag in seconds.
Use our online Meta Robots Tag Generator to create directives like index, noindex, follow, nofollow, nosnippet, and noimageindex.
What Is a Meta Robots Tag in SEO?
The meta robots tag is an HTML tag that instructs search engines how to crawl and index a page.
It is normally placed inside the <head> section of a webpage:
<meta name="robots" content="index, follow">
Robots tags in SEO can control whether a page appears in search results, whether links should be followed, and whether certain features of search results should be displayed.
How to Use Our Meta Robots Tag Generator
Creating a robots tag takes just a few steps:
- Select the robots instructions you need for your page.
- Choose options such as index/noindex and follow/nofollow.
- Create your own meta robots tag.
- Copy the generated HTML.
- Add it to the <head> section of your web page.
The free meta robots tag generator tool is especially useful when you don’t want to remember the exact syntax of different robots instructions.
Important Robots Meta Tag Directives
Index and Follow
index, followAllows crawlers to consider a page for indexing and follow links.
However, robots follow indexing behavior is usually the default for crawlable pages, so explicitly adding index, follow is usually unnecessary.
Noindex
The noindex directive tells supported search engines not to show the page in search results.
Example:
<meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow">
It can be useful for pages that visitors may need but that you don’t want appearing as separate Google search results.
Nofollow
The nofollow directive tells supported search engines not to follow links on that particular page.
It should not be confused with the rel="nofollow" attribute, which can be applied to individual links.
Nosegment Meta Tag
The nosnippet meta tag prevents Google from showing a text snippet or video preview for the page in search results.
Example:
<meta name="robots" content="nosnippet">
Use this only when you intentionally want to restrict how content from the page is displayed in search results.
Meta Robots Tag Checker: What Should You Check?
Before publishing a critical page, a meta robots tag checker or manual source code review can help identify unwanted directives.
Check that:
- Key SEO pages are not accidentally set to noindex.
- Nofollow is not unintentionally applied to a page.
- Multiple robots tags do not create conflicting directives.
- The tag is correctly placed within the HTML <head>.
- Your robots.txt file is not preventing crawlers from accessing a page that requires meta robots instructions.
A small indexing error can keep an otherwise useful page out of search results.
Meta Tags in HTML and Google Search
There are many meta tags in HTML that Google can understand, but they serve different purposes.
For example, a meta description can provide a brief description of a page, while the robots meta tag controls crawling, indexing, and how the page appears in search results.
For SEO, it is important that each meta tag is used for its intended purpose, rather than adding unnecessary instructions to every page.
Meta Robots Tag vs X-Robots-Tag
The meta robots tag is added directly to the HTML of a page:
<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex”>
Instead, an X-Robots-Tag is sent via the HTTP response header.
The X-Robots-Tag can be particularly useful for resources where it is not practical to include an HTML meta tag, such as PDF files and other non-HTML content.
Both approaches can provide helpful indexing instructions, but they are implemented differently.
When Should You Use a Robots Meta Tag?
A robots meta tag can be useful when you need page-specific control over search engine indexing.
For example, you can use appropriate directives for some internal search results, thank-you pages, duplicate or temporary pages, staging content, and other URLs that should not appear independently in search results.
Avoid adding noindex just because a page doesn’t rank well. First, review important pages for content quality, search intent, internal linking, and other SEO issues.
Generate the Right Robots Tag
Our free online meta robots tag generator makes it easy to create properly formatted robots instructions without manually writing HTML.
Choose the settings you want, create the tag, and add it to your page. For important URLs, always double-check the final instruction before publishing—especially when using noindex or nofollow.