Robot meta tag points, question

Nofollow, noindex, googlebot metas

[beinerts]

Hi all, Just joined the forum and this is my first post :-) I saw a thread about robots which has been closed so I'm opening a new one. A few points that weren't covered, you can use a googlebot meta tag to stop google archiving your page, to to dthis include the tag:
<meta name="googlebot" content="noarchive">

Of course you can also include nofollow and noindex in the same tag:
<meta name="googlebot" content="noindex,nofollow,noarchive">

A lot of people also mentioned the robot.txt file. A point to note is that google will follow the meta tag over the robots.txt file if both are presend. Not a lot of people realise that...

Now for my question: If you use include files, say for a header or footer and want thes files excluded from search engines (you wouldn't want them popping up on saerch engines after all!) and you set a noindex, nofollow, noarchive tag and/or exclude them in the robot.txt file, will the "main" page which call these include files still be indexed on google etc.? Does that make sense?!

I'll give you an example. My main page index.php has the robots meta tag set to all, because it wants to be found by google etc. However, It calls header.php at the top of the page (but below the meta tags) and footer.php at the bottom of the page. Both of these have the robots meta set to nofollow, noindex etc. as they don't want to be indexed individualy. If you were to then load index.php and look at the source, it would allow the robots at the top of the code, but further down it would block the robots! Which would it follow.

Or is it the case that the header.php and footer.php files don't need to have any meta tags set, as they are only called via and include command and are not hyperlinked anywhere? If this is the case maybe it's prudent to get rid of all meta tags on them but exclude them via the robot.txt file?

I'm not expecting one answer to all of this, I just wanted to start a discussion on it really!

Thanks all!

[Brett_Tabke]

First, welcome to the forums.

> will the "main" page which call these
> include files still be indexed on google etc.?

Yes. The final page is all that matters. when in doubt - look at the source generated in the browser - that is exactly what a search engine will see.

[beinerts]

Thanks for the welcome and the answer. This seems to be a very useful forum. I guess the answer to my question then is to set no meta tags in your include files and to set them as you want in the "main" page. Then you can always use the robot.txt file to exclude your "include" files, although if they don't have a hyperlink pointing to them googlebot (and other robots) can't find them anyway.