I just wanted to post a quick blog about the Meta Robots tag. Quite often, we in the SEO world try to make sure that the code element of a page is small in comparison to the amount of visible text on the page.

So we move CSS formatting and JavaScript off the page into external files, and we encourage the use of "table-less design". However, we can be less than frugal with the meta robots tag, especially as each tag can be added in a separate line.

Therefore, amalgamating them all on one line gives you:

<meta name="robots" content ="index, follow, noodp, noydir">

But there is an even shorter syntax, using the "all" reference instead of index and follow. 

<meta name="robots" content ="all, noodp, noydir">

But remember, if you are writing it for an XHTML site, then you'll need a training slash to make it validate!

<meta name="robots" content ="all, noodp, noydir" />

Technically, you could miss out the "all" as that is the default behaviour, but if you are being explicit, then this tag will do the job for you.

I hope this helps you out with your SEO friendly meta robots tagging. If you want to find out more on the Meta Robots tag, especially the other parameters that are available, then here are some other places to look:

• Official Google Webmaster Central Blog on meta robots
• Meta Robots 101 from Search Engine Land

And if you want to know more about why you would want to use this tag in the opposite configuration, then see my earlier blog post Three Ways to Keep a Web Page out of the Search Engines which also explains why you would want to remove pages from the search engines.