What is this?

[CSUjr]

What does this code mean and what does it do? :confused:
<META NAME="robots" CONTENT="index all, follow all">

Can anyone give me a concise description?

In other words, not just :rolleyes: > It tells "robots" to run through your site, or Why do you want to know, or it depends on "---", or it only works on "---", etc.

Thanks in advance for helpful, clear, pertinent, concise responses :thumbsup:

[felgall]

It is an incorrectly coded statement that probably wont work on any browser.

The content of the robots meta tag can contain

index - meaning index this page in search engines
noindex - meaning don't index it
follow - meaning follow the links on this page to find more pages to index
nofollow - meaning don't follow the links
all - supported by some search engines as equivalent to index,follow
none - supported by some search engines as equivalent to noindex,nofollow
noarchive - instruction for Google to not archive the page
nosnippet - instruction for Google to not create a snippet of the page to display in search results

Where more than one value is used they need to be separated by commas.

Decent search engines will follow these instructions. Spam spiders will of course ignore them.

To fix that code recode it as:

<META NAME="robots" CONTENT="index,follow">

or just leave it out since that is the assumed default when it isn't there.

[CSUjr]

Thank you Stephen, this is very helpful. :thumbsup:

just leave it out since that is the assumed default when it isn't there.

Decent search engines will follow these instructions. Spam spiders will of course ignore them.

Question;
If the instructions are left out and "Decent search engines" will spider "follow, "index", etc., the page references by default - Will "spam spiders" still ignore everything? :confused:

Or, will using instructions such as these cause spam spiders to ignore the page references?

In other words, to get the most out of the page references :p and avoid activities of spam spiders and their resulting potential problems :mad: - What is the best thing(s) to do? :confused:

Thanks

[felgall]

Spam spiders will grab whatever it is that they are looking for (eg. email addresses) from any web page that they can find regardless of any instructions that you provide via a robots meta tag or robots.txt file. There is no way to get the spammers to ignore your page, the best that you can do is to not include the sorts of things that they are looking for in your web pages (eg. use a contact form instead of an email link and add the destination email address to the email server side after the form is submitted).