robots meta tags..needed?

[Brando]

As i learn html and i view source on others pages to see what is there to learn from is see the following robot meta tags...

<meta name="robots" content="index,follow">
<meta name="GOOGLEBOT" content="INDEX,FOLLOW">
<meta NAME="GOOGLEBOT" CONTENT="NOARCHIVE">

The first two direct spiders to crawl the enire site, the second being the google spider specifically, the third to keep google from caching the page...correct?
Questions...
Is there any intrinsic advantage to any of these robot meta tags?
Can they in fact cause more harm than good?
Is this a valid tag... to keep other spiders from caching the page?
<meta name="robots" content="noarchive">

What other robot or similar tags might i consider?
Thanks

[treeline]

You don't need any of these. Some people like being in Google, but don't want to have their pages or images cached for various reasons. You could just as easily (probably easier) use a robots.txt file for this instead.

Here is a good guide to robots.txt:

[robotstxt.org...]

[jdMorgan]

The second line of that code is redundant, since googlebot will respect the first, general directive.

The first line of code is redundant too, though, because "index,follow" is the default behaviour if no robots tag is present.

The third one will prevent Google from showing a cached copy of the page, and may be useful for that and other reasons.

Jim

[Brando]

Thanks for the replies and the links to robots.txt info.

Now , between these two..is the google specifficity neccesary or will google also follow the genericRobots instruction in the second?

<meta NAME="GOOGLEBOT" CONTENT="NOARCHIVE">
and
<meta name="robots" content="noarchive">
Thanks