## Special Meta Tags for Search Engines **Meta robot tags** are directives that search engines will always respect. Adding these robots tags can make the indexation of your website easier. **Meta robots tags** or[`robots.txt`](https://nextjs.org/learn/seo/crawling-and-indexing/robots-txt) files are **directives** and will always be obeyed. **Canonical tags** are **recommendations** that Google can decide to obey or not. ```html <meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow" /> ``` The `robots` tag is very common, by default, it has value `index,follow`, `all` is also valid. - noindex - Not show this page in search results. - Omitting `noindex` will nidicate the page can be indexed and shown in search results. - Sample Use Cases: Settings, policies, internal search pages. - nofollow - To not follow links on this page. - Omitting this will **allow robots to crawl and follow links on this page**. Links found on other pages may enable crawling, so if `link A` appears in pages`X` and `Y`, and `X` has a `nofollow` robots tag, but `Y` doesn't, Google may decide to crawl the link. You can see a [full list of directives](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/robots/robots_meta_tag#directives) in the Google official documentation. ### Googlebot Tags ```html <meta name="googlebot" content="noindex,nofollow" /> ``` > Googlebox specific tag. ```html <meta name="google" content="nositelinkssearchbox" /> ``` > When users search for your site, Google Search results sometimes display a search box specific to your site, along with other direct links to your site. This tag tells Google not to show the sitelinks search box. ```html <meta name="google" content="notranslate" /> ``` > Ask google not to provide a translation for the page. ## Reference - https://nextjs.org/learn/seo/crawling-and-indexing/metatags