February 11, 2025

SEO, in its most elementary sense, depends upon one factor above all others: Search engine spiders crawling and indexing your website.

However almost each web site goes to have pages that you simply don’t wish to embody on this exploration.

For instance, do you actually need your privateness coverage or inner search pages displaying up in Google outcomes?

In a best-case situation, these are doing nothing to drive visitors to your website actively, and in a worst-case, they could possibly be diverting visitors from extra necessary pages.

Fortunately, Google permits site owners to inform search engine bots what pages and content material to crawl and what to disregard. There are a number of methods to do that, the most typical being utilizing a robots.txt file or the meta robots tag.

We’ve a wonderful and detailed rationalization of the ins and outs of robots.txt, which you must undoubtedly learn.

However in high-level phrases, it’s a plain textual content file that lives in your web site’s root and follows the Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP).

Robots.txt gives crawlers with directions in regards to the website as a complete, whereas meta robots tags embody instructions for particular pages.

Some meta robots tags you would possibly make use of embody index, which tells search engines like google so as to add the web page to their index; noindex, which tells it to not add a web page to the index or embody it in search outcomes; comply with, which instructs a search engine to comply with the hyperlinks on a web page; nofollow, which tells it to not comply with hyperlinks, and a complete host of others.

Each robots.txt and meta robots tags are helpful instruments to maintain in your toolbox, however there’s additionally one other option to instruct search engine bots to noindex or nofollow: the X-Robots-Tag.

What Is The X-Robots-Tag?

The X-Robots-Tag is one other manner so that you can management how your webpages are crawled and listed by spiders. As a part of the HTTP header response to a URL, it controls indexing for a complete web page, in addition to the particular parts on that web page.

And whereas utilizing meta robots tags is pretty simple, the X-Robots-Tag is a little more difficult.

However this, after all, raises the query:

When Ought to You Use The X-Robots-Tag?

In accordance with Google, “Any directive that can be utilized in a robots meta tag may also be specified as an X-Robots-Tag.”

When you can set robots.txt-related directives within the headers of an HTTP response with each the meta robots tag and X-Robots Tag, there are particular conditions the place you’d wish to use the X-Robots-Tag – the 2 commonest being when:

  • You wish to management how your non-HTML information are being crawled and listed.
  • You wish to serve directives site-wide as an alternative of on a web page degree.

For instance, if you wish to block a particular picture or video from being crawled – the HTTP response technique makes this simple.

The X-Robots-Tag header can be helpful as a result of it means that you can mix a number of tags inside an HTTP response or use a comma-separated checklist of directives to specify directives.

Perhaps you don’t need a sure web page to be cached and wish it to be unavailable after a sure date. You should use a mix of “noarchive” and “unavailable_after” tags to instruct search engine bots to comply with these directions.

Basically, the ability of the X-Robots-Tag is that it’s far more versatile than the meta robots tag.

The benefit of utilizing an X-Robots-Tag with HTTP responses is that it means that you can use common expressions to execute crawl directives on non-HTML, in addition to apply parameters on a bigger, world degree.

That will help you perceive the distinction between these directives, it’s useful to categorize them by kind. That’s, are they crawler directives or indexer directives?

Right here’s a useful cheat sheet to clarify:

Crawler Directives Indexer Directives
Robots.txt – makes use of the person agent, permit, disallow, and sitemap directives to specify the place on-site search engine bots are allowed to crawl and never allowed to crawl. Meta Robots tag – means that you can specify and stop search engines like google from displaying specific pages on a website in search outcomes.

Nofollow – means that you can specify hyperlinks that ought to not move on authority or PageRank.

X-Robots-tag – means that you can management how specified file sorts are listed.

The place Do You Put The X-Robots-Tag?

Let’s say you wish to block particular file sorts. A perfect strategy could be so as to add the X-Robots-Tag to an Apache configuration or a .htaccess file.

The X-Robots-Tag might be added to a website’s HTTP responses in an Apache server configuration by way of .htaccess file.

Actual-World Examples And Makes use of Of The X-Robots-Tag

In order that sounds nice in concept, however what does it appear to be in the actual world? Let’s have a look.

Let’s say we wished search engines like google to not index .pdf file sorts. This configuration on Apache servers would look one thing just like the under:

<Information ~ ".pdf$">
  Header set X-Robots-Tag "noindex, nofollow"
</Information>

In Nginx, it could appear to be the under:

location ~* .pdf$ 
  add_header X-Robots-Tag "noindex, nofollow";

Now, let’s take a look at a special situation. Let’s say we wish to use the X-Robots-Tag to dam picture information, akin to .jpg, .gif, .png, and so forth., from being listed. You can do that with an X-Robots-Tag that will appear to be the under:

<Information ~ ".(png|jpe?g|gif)$">
Header set X-Robots-Tag "noindex"
</Information>

Please be aware that understanding how these directives work and the affect they’ve on each other is essential.

For instance, what occurs if each the X-Robots-Tag and a meta robots tag are situated when crawler bots uncover a URL?

If that URL is blocked from robots.txt, then sure indexing and serving directives can’t be found and won’t be adopted.

If directives are to be adopted, then the URLs containing these can’t be disallowed from crawling.

Verify For An X-Robots-Tag

There are just a few totally different strategies that can be utilized to test for an X-Robots-Tag on the location.

The best option to test is to put in a browser extension that may let you know X-Robots-Tag details about the URL.

Robots Exclusion CheckerScreenshot of Robots Exclusion Checker, December 2022

One other plugin you should use to find out whether or not an X-Robots-Tag is getting used, for instance, is the Web Developer plugin.

By clicking on the plugin in your browser and navigating to “View Response Headers,” you’ll be able to see the assorted HTTP headers getting used.

web developer plugin

One other technique that can be utilized for scaling as a way to pinpoint points on web sites with one million pages is Screaming Frog.

After working a website by Screaming Frog, you’ll be able to navigate to the “X-Robots-Tag” column.

This can present you which of them sections of the location are utilizing the tag, together with which particular directives.

Screaming Frog Report. X-Robot-TagScreenshot of Screaming Frog Report. X-Robotic-Tag, December 2022

Utilizing X-Robots-Tags On Your Web site

Understanding and controlling how search engines like google work together together with your web site is the cornerstone of search engine marketing. And the X-Robots-Tag is a robust software you should use to do exactly that.

Simply remember: It’s not with out its risks. It is extremely simple to make a mistake and deindex your whole website.

That mentioned, should you’re studying this piece, you’re most likely not an web optimization newbie. As long as you employ it correctly, take your time and test your work, you’ll discover the X-Robots-Tag to be a helpful addition to your arsenal.

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