How to handle multiple values in meta robots?

Question

About the meta-robots, how many values can I put?

<meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow, nocache, nosnippet, noodp, noydir">

Is this valid? Or multiple meta elements?

<meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow">
<meta name="robots" content="nocache, nosnippet">
<meta name="robots" content="noodp, noydir">

Is this possible?

What is the best practice?

You can combine them with commas, it is valid. I am not sure but `contents` must be `content` — HddnTHA, Aug 26 '14 at 07:56
@HddnTHA thanks :D about content, you're right, I'm tired ... — RemRem, Aug 26 '14 at 08:23

HddnTHA · Accepted Answer · 2014-08-26T09:03:25.893

4

As you mentioned in your question's first code block;

<meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow, nocache, nosnippet, noodp, noydir">

It is valid. You can combine them with commas use it in under 1 tag.
You can also find some good examples in this link

edited Aug 26 '14 at 09:03

answered Aug 26 '14 at 08:52

HddnTHA

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score 2 · Answer 2 · edited May 23 '17 at 10:30

For HTML5, the robots name is registered in WHATWG‘s MetaExtensions. There it says:

A comma-separated list of operators explaining how search engine crawlers should treat the content.

But as the entry in the wiki doesn‘t define that it’s restricted to one occurrence (like it’s the case with meta-description), it should be valid to have several meta-robots elements in a document.

If you don’t have a good reason to use several elements, use only one and comma-separate its values.

How to handle multiple values in meta robots?

2 Answers2