Meta Robots Generator

Need to keep a page out of search results or limit its snippet?

The robots meta tag is how you tell search engines, page by page, whether to index a URL, whether to follow its links, and how much of it to show in results. The syntax is short, but a typo such as "no-index" is simply ignored. This builder assembles a correctly spelled tag from checkboxes, so you only have to decide what you want. It works offline in your browser.

Step by step

1. Leave index and follow ticked for a normal page, or tick noindex and/or nofollow to restrict it. When both boxes in a pair are ticked, the tool keeps only the restrictive value.
2. Add extras as needed: noarchive (no stored copy), nosnippet (no text preview), noimageindex (keep the page's images out of image results), notranslate (no translation offer in results).
3. For a snippet cap, enter a character count in the snippet length field. The value is written as max-snippet followed by your number.
4. Press "Generate Tag". Check the line that appears, press "Copy", and add it inside the page's head section.

What to watch for

A noindex tag only works when the crawler can load the page. Blocking the same URL in robots.txt hides the tag, and the URL can stay indexed from links alone. Pick one method per goal: robots.txt controls crawling, the meta tag controls indexing. Watch for your CMS or SEO plugin printing its own robots tag too; with two tags on one page, Google follows the most restrictive rule across both. Contradictory choices inside this tool, such as nosnippet plus a snippet length, resolve the same way. For files that have no HTML head, such as PDFs, you need the X-Robots-Tag response header instead, which this page does not produce.

Questions people ask

Do I need a robots tag that says index, follow?

No. Those are the defaults, so the tag is optional on pages you want indexed. Including it does no harm.

Is noarchive still useful?

Less than it was. Google dropped cached page links from its results in 2024, so the directive mainly speaks to other search engines that still honor it.

Can I target Googlebot only?

Yes, by changing name="robots" to name="googlebot" in the copied tag. The generator always writes the general version, which every compliant crawler reads.

Further reading: Meta Robots Found Outside of Head and Canonical Points to a Noindex URL: Fixing the Contradiction.

The same tool is also published on the static mirror at seoprocheck.github.io, and the rest of the set is on the free tools page.