On-Page SEO Checker
Score a page against the on-page checks that actually matter.
Meta Robots Tag Generator
Build robots and X-Robots-Tag directives without guessing the syntax.
Other directives
0 suppresses it, -1 means no limit.
Drops the page from results after this date — useful for events and time-limited offers.
Robots directives
Your generated code appears here.
Quick Tool Overview
The Meta Robots Tag Generator builds indexing directives without you having to remember the syntax, in both forms: the meta tag for HTML pages and the X-Robots-Tag header for PDFs and images. It flags the combinations that backfire, including the classic of blocking a URL in robots.txt and then adding a noindex the crawler will never see.
- What it does
- Builds meta robots tags and X-Robots-Tag headers
- You give it
- The directives you want, and optionally a specific crawler
- You get back
- A meta tag and the equivalent HTTP header line
- Best for
- Staging pages, thin pages, filtered listings and non-HTML files
About the Meta Robots Tag Generator
Tick the directives you want and the generator writes both forms: the meta robots tag for HTML pages and the X-Robots-Tag HTTP header for PDFs, images and anything else that has no head to put a tag in. Per-crawler rules for Googlebot and Bingbot are supported.
The directives interact in ways that are easy to get wrong. noindex with nofollow stops Google discovering anything through that page, which is rarely what people mean. noarchive and nosnippet do different things and nosnippet is far more aggressive than most people expect — it removes the description entirely rather than shortening it, which usually costs clicks. And the one that catches everyone: a page blocked in robots.txt can never be seen to carry a noindex, so blocking and noindexing the same URL leaves it indexed with no description at all. Each of these is flagged as you build.
Key features of the Meta Robots Tag Generator
Every current directive
index, follow, noarchive, nosnippet, notranslate, noimageindex, max-snippet, max-image-preview and max-video-preview.
Conflict detection
index with noindex, or a robots.txt block with a noindex, are pointed out as you build them.
Per-crawler tags
Write a googlebot or bingbot tag that overrides the general one for that crawler only.
Header form for files
A PDF has no head to hold a meta tag, so the X-Robots-Tag line is generated too.
Plain-English summary
A sentence describing what the tag actually does, so a wrong tick is obvious before it ships.
How to use the Meta Robots Tag Generator
-
1
Choose indexing and following
index or noindex, follow or nofollow. These two decide almost everything else.
-
2
Add snippet controls
Limit snippet length, video preview length or image preview size, or suppress them entirely.
-
3
Set per-crawler rules if needed
A googlebot or bingbot tag overrides the general robots tag for that crawler only.
-
4
Copy the tag or the header
Take the meta tag for HTML pages, or the X-Robots-Tag header line for files.
Frequently asked questions
noindex to keep a page out of search results; robots.txt to stop a crawler spending time on it. They are not interchangeable, and combining them backfires: a URL blocked in robots.txt is never fetched, so the noindex on it is never seen, and it can stay indexed with no description at all.
It tells Google not to follow any link on that page. It is much broader than a rel="nofollow" on a single link, and it stops discovery of anything only reachable through that page. Use it deliberately, not as a default.
noarchive removes the cached copy link. nosnippet removes the text description from the result entirely, leaving only a title and URL, which usually costs a great deal of traffic. If you only want a shorter description, use max-snippet with a number instead.
Whenever the file has no HTML head — PDFs, images, video files, spreadsheets. The header does the same job from the server response, and it is also the only way to apply a directive across a whole directory in one rule.
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