Combining Robots Meta Tags

[keyplyr]

The new tag to ask indexing bots (specifically MSN) to not use the Open Directory's description is the same type of tag I already have. Why not combine them?

Could this:

<meta name="robots" content="noodp">
<meta name="robots" content="noarchive">

Be shortened to this?

<meta name="robots" content="noodp,noarchive">

[tedster]

From a pure syntax point of view, something like what you suggest makes sense. But who knows how MSN has programmed their crawler, eh? Two tags might be safer.

[encyclo]

I agree with tedster, but for a slightly different reason - as MSN have already programmed their parser to handle values such as

"noindex,follow"

within the the robots meta tag, the problem is unlikely to come from that source.

The problem is how the other search engines would handle the

noodp

value. As this is not a usual value for the robots meta, it will potentially be parsed as an error. Most likely it will simply have no effect, but as the value is

"no[i]something[/i]"

, there is a (minuscule) chance that a bot may decide to read it as

noindex

to be on the safe site. That would be disastrous. ;)

The second problem is that if you use two separate meta robots tags, will that be parsed as one adding to the other, or the second replacing the first?

So in all, I would suggest two elements, one for robots and one specifically for MSN (as they are the only ones supporting

noodp

anyway:

<meta name="msnbot" content="noodp">
<meta name="robots" content="noarchive">

All this, of course, is to be absolutely safe - it is extremely likely that:

<meta name="robots" content="noarchive,noodp">

would work perfectly.