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name: robots-meta description: "Use when applies to all HTML pages. Use when auditing pages that have disappeared from search results or when checking staging vs. production meta tag parity." metadata: category: seo priority: high difficulty: beginner estimatedTime: "10" source: frontendchecklist.io url: https://frontendchecklist.io/rules/seo/robots-meta

Set robots meta directives correctly

An accidental noindex on a key landing page silently removes it from search results; audit every page's robots directive to avoid invisible ranking losses.

Quick Reference

• Place <meta name="robots" content="..."> in <head> to control indexing per-page
• Use noindex only on pages that should not appear in search results
• Avoid noindex, nofollow on pages you want crawled for PageRank flow
• Crawler-specific tags (googlebot, bingbot) override the generic robots tag for that crawler

Check

Inspect <head> for <meta name="robots" content="...">. Verify the content value is intentional (e.g., production pages should not have noindex). Check for conflicting googlebot-specific tags.

Fix

Remove or update the noindex directive from pages that should appear in search results. For pages that must be blocked, confirm noindex is intentional. Remove duplicate or conflicting robots meta tags.

Explain

Explain the difference between robots.txt and meta robots, when each should be used, and why noindex combined with follow still allows link equity to flow.

Code Review

Review metadata generation, rendered HTML, structured data, and response headers related to Set robots meta directives correctly. Flag exact routes or templates where search-facing output violates the rule, and describe how to verify the final page output.

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For full implementation details, code examples, and framework-specific guidance, see references/rule.md.

Rule page: https://frontendchecklist.io/rules/seo/robots-meta