Google Only Meta Tags

If you've ever been told by someone that they know of a special secret, like the Google Meta Tag, they are simply lying to your face. There are, however, special meta tags designed for the Googlebot.

Googlebot: noarchive

This tag does not let google display your cached content. If you find this appealing, add the following: <meta name="googlebot" content="noarchive">

Googlebot: noindex

This tag is basically the 'robots' meta tag that disallows a page to get indexed. Useful for easily hiding pages that you don't want to be found, especially if it is longtail. If you want to do this, simply add: <meta name="googlebot" content="noindex">

Googlebot: nofollow

This one is especially useful if you have a lot of affiliate links going out, and you are only sending paid traffic. It will not allow your 'link juice' to spill out from your page onto that link, alternatively if you have other links on the page that you need to pass power to, just use the rel="nofollow" in the link's <a> tag. For this Meta tag, simply put: <meta name="googlebot" content="nofollow">

Googlebot: nosnippet

This meta tag disallows Google to display exerpts (think blog teaser posts) in the search engine results. This is sort of useful. If you don't want extra long tail results from teaser posts, add: <meta name="googlebot" content="nosnippet">

Recommendations:

We only suggest you use these if you specifically want to please the Google search engines. Google is the only engine that obeys these Meta Tags.

-----------

This post was written by Greg Voakes of Stikky Media SEO in Victoria, BC.