A meta robots tag is an HTML element placed in a page’s head section that provides specific crawling and indexing instructions to search engines for that individual page, such as noindex, nofollow, or various combinations of directives.
Unlike robots.txt, which controls crawler access at a broader site or directory level, the meta robots tag allows precise, page-by-page control over indexing behavior without blocking the page from being crawled entirely.
Auditing meta robots tags across a site is an important technical SEO check, since an incorrectly applied noindex or nofollow directive can silently prevent important pages from ranking.
Meta robots tag audits are a standard part of our Technical SEO service.