Beginners Guide To Noodp, Noarchive, Nosnippet, Noydir Meta Tag

Search engine optimization is a very delicate subject in today’s technology world, particularly if you want to start receiving organic traffic to your website from search engines with Google the giant of all. These search engine uses the service of a bot to crawl and index the web. when a search engine robot visit a page, they first check the meta tag of that HTML document and obey any rules stated by the meta tag.
The popular meta tag found on almost all webpages are: meta description, meta keywords, author, and social media meta tags.
The standard meta tag format is


<meta name="NAME-OF-ROBOT-TO-TARGET" content="COMMANDS">

The name of the robot to target are:

  1. Googlebot – name of Google robot
  2. Teoma – name of Ask.com robot
  3. Bingbot – name of Bing search bot

while the commands can be description, keywords, noodp, noarchive etc.

if you are to target all search engine robot, use “ROBOTS” as the meta tag name. for example


<meta name="ROBOTS" content="COMMAND">

We are going to explain some of the infamous yet effective meta tag, they are the Noodp, Noarchive, Nosnippet, and Noydir

Noodp Tag

When websites are to be listed to Open Directory Project, a description of the website is usually filled before submission. sometimes when Google is displaying website on search engine result page(serp), the description submitted to Open Directory Project (Dmoz.org) usually overwrite the description of of the page set using the description meta tag.
To stop Google from using the ODP description, you will need to use the noodp meta tag, which is usually denoted by


<meta name="googlebot" content="noodp">

By doing this, you are telling Googlebot(name for Google search robot) not to duplicate the ODP description but to use the description which is located in your site.

Noydir Tag

Just like the noodp, this meta tag is use to prevent yahoo search and bing from displaying the Yahoo! Directory titles and description in search result. this tag is only supported by Bing and yahoo search.
the noydir meta tag, which is usually implemented using the tag below


<meta name="bingbot" content="noodp">

Noarchive Tag

This meta tag is use to tell search engines not to make cache page to be available on search result. it is supported by the world’s three(3) major search engine; Google.com, bing.com and ask.com


<meta name="bingbot" content="noarchive">

Nosnippet Tag

This tag instruct Google not not to display description below the page in search result as well as prevent caching of the page. mind you, this tag is only supported by Google alone.

Nofollow Tag

This tag informs search engines robot not to follow and index links found on a given page, there by preventing the passing of link juice to that link or URL.
Although search engines can still follow and index that link if found in another website or page without the nofollow command.

Noindex Tag

This tag is use to tell search engines not to index that given page. it’s supported by Ask, Google and Bing.

Practical Meta Tag Implementation

  • If we want to tell all search engines robot not to cache page and also not to use OPD and yahoo directory description and title on search result, the below code will be suitable
    
    <meta name="ROBOTS" content="NOARCHIVE, NOODP, NOYDIR">
    
  • Note: it is important you know the “robots name” and “commands” are case-insensitive.

  • If you’re targeting a given search robot, the “meta name” will change from “ROBOTS” to the given search engine robot name. Take for examples;
    
    <meta name="GOOGLEBOT" content="NOODP">
    

    The above code specifically tell Google search bot not to use ODP titles and description on search result.

    
    <meta name="TEOMA" content="NOINDEX">
    

    This tell “Ask.com” search robot not to index that given web page.

    
    <meta name="BINGBOT" content="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW">
    

    This meta tag tell Bing search not to index and also not to follow and pass link juice to any link in that page.

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