Meta Robots "Index, Follow"

[SEOhughesm]

In my MozBar under "General Attributes" it says "index, follow" next to Meta Roberts for one of our client's websites. I've never seen "index, follow" before. I've seen it say "not found." What does index, follow mean and is that a bad thing? I know the reason should be obvious but this site has had a lot of problems and I'm wondering if this is related.

[adamxj2]

Hello!

Index/Follow means that you are allowing search engines to index your pages and follow links through those pages. If you didn't have this tag on the page, search engines would do it anyway. Basically, this meta tag isn't necessarily a bad thing and the search engines would be doing it even if the tag wasn't there.

You can use meta robots to do good things for your site, such as stop the crawling of blog archive pages to limit duplicate content. There's tons of resources here on MOZ about the robots file and I would suggest looking into it.  This is a good one: http://moz.com/learn/seo/robotstxt

What type of problems is your site having?

[SEOhughesm]

Thank you! That was very helpful!

[Sheena_Schleicher]

What you're seeing is the page's meta robots tag, which instructs the search engine bots to (in this case) index a specific page and follow links on the page. The opposite, "noindex,nofollow" instructs the search bots to not include this page in its index or follow links on the page. You can also use "noindex, follow" so the search engine keeps the page out of its index, but still follows the links on the page. I personally have never come across an example of "index, nofollow" but I imagine that it's possible - probably more of an outdated practice though related to hoarding links.

If you've never seen this attribute before, it may be because the page doesn't include the tag (in which case the bots, by default, assume "index, follow"). And as for whether or not having it is a bad thing - probably not, unless it's a page you really don't want visible in search results.