Introduction to Robots meta tags

The "robots" meta tag

If your web host prohibits you from uploading "robots.txt" to the root
directory, or you simply wish to restrict crawlers from a few select pages on
your site, an alternative to "robots.txt" is to use the robots meta tag.

Creating
your "robots" meta tag

The "robots" meta tag looks similar to any meta tag, and should be added
between the HEAD section of your page(s) in question:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow" />

Here's a list of the values you can specify within the "contents"
attribute of this tag:

Value	Description
(no)index	Determines whether crawler should index this page. Possible values: "noindex" or "index"
(no)follow	Determines whether crawler should follow links on this page and crawl them. Possible values: "nofollow" and "follow."

Here are a few examples:

1) This disallows both indexing and following of links by a
crawler on that specific page:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow" />

2) This disallows indexing of the page, but lets the crawler go on
and follow/crawl links contained within it.

<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow" />

3) This allows indexing of the page, but instructs the crawler to
not crawl links contained within it:

<meta name="robots" content="index,nofollow" />

4) Finally, there is a shorthand way of declaring 1) above (don't
index nor follow links on page):

<meta name="robots" content="none">