The robots meta tag tells search engines which pages you want indexed and how. In this article, I will tell you what options there are within Joomla and how to use this option.

Where can you set the robots meta tag?

There are several places where you can find the robots setting in Joomla.

Robots meta tag setting in the general settings

To start with in"System > General settings", at the bottom of the first tab you will find the Metadata settings.

Here you can set the robots meta tag for the entire website.

You can use this when you don't want the website to appear in search results, for example for an intranet or a development environment.

So make sure you know what you are doing before setting anything here. You won't be the first to accidentally remove your entire website from search results with this.

Set robots metatag per menu item

Go to menus and open a menu item.

In the "Metadata" tab, you can find the robots setting.

Set robots meta tag per article

Go to content and open an article.

In the "Publish" tab, you can find the robots setting.

What do the robots options mean?

Under menu items and articles, you will see option "use general". When you use that, the "general settings" setting will be adopted. In most cases, this will be "Index, Follow".

index

With "index" you signal to search engines that you want the page to be indexed.

noindex

With No index you indicate that search engines should not index the page, which means that this page will not be shown in the search results.

follow

The follow option indicates that search engines should follow links within the page and pass on a link authority to underlying pages.

no follow

The no-follow option indicates that search engine should not follow the links within the page and should not pass authority to underlying pages.

When do you use a robots meta tag option?

By default, the option is set to "index, follow".

If you don't want a certain page in the search results (e.g. the general terms and conditions page) use "no-index, follow". This way, the page is excluded, but links are still followed (when someone continues on your website via the menu after visiting the page).

Personally, I never use the no-follow option.