| Meta Tag | Purpose & Usage | Example |
| description | Provides a short summary of the page, sometimes used in search snippets. | <meta name=”description” content=”Brief page summary here”> |
| robots | Controls crawling and indexing by all search engines. | <meta name=”robots” content=”noindex, nofollow”> |
| googlebot | Controls crawling and indexing specifically by Googlebot (Google’s crawler). | <meta name=”googlebot” content=”noindex”> |
| notranslate | Prevents Google from offering automatic translation for this page. | <meta name=”googlebot” content=”notranslate”> |
| nopagereadaloud | Prevents Google’s text-to-speech services from reading the page aloud. | <meta name=”google” content=”nopagereadaloud”> |
| google-site-verification | Verifies site ownership for Google Search Console. | <meta name=”google-site-verification” content=”verification_code”> |
| Content-Type / charset | Defines character encoding and content type. Recommended to use UTF-8. | <meta charset=”UTF-8″> or <meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=UTF-8″> |
| refresh | Redirects users after a specified time (not recommended, better to use 301 redirects). | <meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”5;url=https://example.com/”> |
| viewport | Controls page layout on mobile devices; essential for mobile-friendliness. | <meta name=”viewport” content=”width=device-width, initial-scale=1″> |
| rating | Labels adult content for SafeSearch filtering. | <meta name=”rating” content=”adult”> |
Supported HTML Tag Attributes for Indexing & Search #
- href — for links, used by Google to discover pages.
- src — for images and other media sources.
- rel — used in <link> and <a> tags to qualify relationships, e.g., rel=”nofollow”, rel=”canonical”.
- data-nosnippet — applied on elements (div, span, section) to exclude parts of content from search snippets.
Important Notes #
- Google ignores unsupported meta tags like <meta name=”keywords”> and others.
- Google determines page language from actual text content, not from HTML lang attributes.
- Google no longer uses <link rel=”next”> and <link rel=”prev”> for pagination.
- The nositelinkssearchbox meta tag is deprecated and ignored.
- Always place meta tags inside the <head> and use valid HTML to ensure they are processed.
- Avoid injecting or modifying meta tags with JavaScript if possible, since this can cause issues with Google reading them.
- Use the URL Inspection Tool in Google Search Console to verify how Google sees your meta tags.
Example Meta Tag Block in <head> #
<head>
<meta charset=”UTF-8″>
<meta name=”description” content=”High-quality used books for children.”>
<meta name=”robots” content=”index, follow”>
<meta name=”google-site-verification” content=”your_verification_code_here”>
<meta name=”viewport” content=”width=device-width, initial-scale=1″>
<title>Example Books</title>
</head>