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    4. Two META Robots tags on a page - which will win?

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    Two META Robots tags on a page - which will win?

    Technical SEO
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    • jmueller
      jmueller last edited by

      Hi,

      Does anybody know which meta-robots tag will "win" if there is more than one on a page?

      The situation:
      our CMS is not very flexible and so we have segments of META-Tags on the page that originate from templates.
      Now any author can add any meta-tag from within his article-editor.
      The logic delivering the pages does not care if there might be more than one meta-robots tag present (one from template, one from within the article).

      Now we could end up with something like this:

      Which one will be regarded by google & co?
      First?
      Last?
      None?

      Thanks a lot,
      Jan

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • PaddyDisplays
        PaddyDisplays last edited by

        I can confirm chris is correct, our crappy CMS does the same thing (for certain pages), and the pages are not indexed

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
        • brad.s.knutson
          brad.s.knutson last edited by

          Why not try to avoid the problem altogheter?  I assume the below line is site-wide:

          If you remove the index, follow meta tag, your pages will still be indexed and followed.  Then allow your authors to decide on a post-by-post basis if they want to noindex or nofollow the page.

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 2
          • Chris.Menke
            Chris.Menke last edited by

            The two get aggregated or the most restrictive gets used so in this case, you'd get

            http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/03/using-robots-meta-tag.html

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 3
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