{"id":17163,"date":"2022-12-19T10:54:28","date_gmt":"2022-12-19T10:54:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.searchenginejournal.com\/everything-x-robots-tag\/447440\/"},"modified":"2022-12-19T10:54:28","modified_gmt":"2022-12-19T10:54:28","slug":"everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-x-robots-tag-http-header-via-sejournal-natalieannhoben","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marketingnewsbox.com\/?p=17163","title":{"rendered":"Everything You Need To Know About The X-Robots-Tag HTTP Header via @sejournal, @natalieannhoben"},"content":{"rendered":"

Search engine optimization, in its most basic sense, relies upon one thing above all others: Search engine spiders crawling and indexing<\/a> your site.<\/p>\n

But nearly every website is going to have pages that you don\u2019t want to include in this exploration.<\/p>\n

For example, do you really want your privacy policy or internal search pages showing up in Google results?<\/p>\n

In a best-case scenario, these are doing nothing to drive traffic to your site actively, and in a worst-case, they could be diverting traffic from more important pages.<\/p>\n

Luckily, Google allows webmasters to tell search engine bots what pages and content to crawl and what to ignore. There are several ways to do this, the most common being using a robots.txt file or the meta robots tag.<\/p>\n

We have an excellent and detailed explanation<\/a> of the ins and outs of robots.txt, which you should definitely read.<\/p>\n

But in high-level terms, it\u2019s a plain text file that lives in your website\u2019s root and follows the Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP)<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Robots.txt provides crawlers with instructions about the site as a whole, while meta robots tags include directions for specific pages.<\/p>\n

Some meta robots tags you might employ include index<\/b>, which tells search engines to add the page to their index; noindex<\/strong>, which tells it not to add a page to the index or include it in search results; follow<\/b>, which instructs a search engine to follow the links on a page; nofollow<\/b>, which tells it not to follow links, and a whole host of others.<\/p>\n

Both robots.txt and meta robots tags are useful tools to keep in your toolbox, but there\u2019s also another way to instruct search engine bots to noindex or nofollow: the X-Robots-Tag<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

What Is The X-Robots-Tag?<\/h2>\n

The X-Robots-Tag is another way for you to control how your webpages are crawled and indexed by spiders. As part of the HTTP header response to a URL, it controls indexing for an entire page, as well as the specific elements on that page.<\/p>\n

And whereas using meta robots tags is fairly straightforward, the X-Robots-Tag is a bit more complicated.<\/p>\n

But this, of course, raises the question:<\/p>\n

When Should You Use The X-Robots-Tag?<\/h2>\n

According to Google<\/a>, \u201cAny directive that can be used in a robots meta tag can also be specified as an X-Robots-Tag.\u201d<\/p>\n

While you can set robots.txt-related directives in the headers of an HTTP response with both the meta robots tag and X-Robots Tag, there are certain situations where you would want to use the X-Robots-Tag \u2013 the two most common being when:<\/p>\n