Your Question is “Which is better: Meta robots tag or robots.txt? Explain why?” well Let’s Discuss.
Web crawlers visit the pages of a website and help a search engine in indexing pages. But there are certain pages that webmasters do not want to be crawled or indexed for a variety of reasons.
For such purposes, a robots.txt file becomes very useful. This file contains instructions for web crawlers or user-agents, according to which they can or cannot access pages of a website. Robots.txt is scanned before a web-crawler visits any website.
To understand robots.txt, the following text could be helpful:-
A robots.txt file has its own limitations. First, it may be possible that some robots (user agents or web crawlers, or spiders) may choose to ignore instructions in a robots.txt file as it is merely a directive. Second, the syntax in robots.txt could be interpreted differently by different crawlers.
Third, since robots.txt is publicly available, it cannot act to protect and hide confidential information. Finally, one cannot prevent a website’s URL from being referenced on other sites despite any directives in robots.txt.
The robots.txt file comes with a lot of options. One can completely block all user-agents from crawling our whole website or one can allow crawlers to visit our whole website. A website could allow or disallow an individual web-crawler to crawl it.
An individual web-crawler could be barred from crawling a specific file/folder on our website. Also, one can exclude a specific robot from crawling while allowing other spiders to crawl a website.
A robots.txt can be used to declare a sitemap for a website. Such a sitemap declaration needs to be an absolute URL i.e. complete URL address should be mentioned. Also, robots could be excluded in a particular folder to crawl a specific image file by mentioning it in robots.txt.
To understand Meta Robots Tag, the following text could be useful:-
Robots Meta Tag (RMT) gives instructions to web-crawlers on how to crawl or index webpage content. An RMT can prevent a spider from crawling a particular page on our website.
Using an RMT can tell a search engine that though it may access a webpage but must not show it in Search Engine Results Pages (SERP).
An RMT is placed in the <head> section of a website. It can be used to disallow a crawler from indexing the content on our webpage and can prevent it from following any of the links.
The RMT comes with a variety of commands. These commands could be used in combinations to have desired effects. Some of these commands include: index, follow, noindex, nofollow, noarchive, translate etc.
Multiple commands could be used in our RMT, for instance, If we want crawlers to not index a webpage but follow the internal links on that page, our meta robots tag would look like this:
<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex, follow”>
Now, having known some of the basics of these two tags, one could attempt to answer whether robots’ meta tag or robots.txt is better. Let us find out.
Generally, if one wants to de-index a page or directory from Google’s SERPs it would be better to use “noindex” meta robot tag than using the robots.txt directive.
If one uses this method then at the next crawl of our website, our page would be de-indexed which means that one then would not need to send a URL removal request. However, one could still use a robots.txt directive along with a Webmaster Tools removal to accomplish this.
When one uses an RMT then it is ensured that our link-equity is not lost. To do this one can use the “follow” command in the RMT. Also, the RMT “noindex” command always has authority over “index” requests.
When it comes to robots.txt, they can be best used to disallow a whole section of a website. Compared to it, an RMT is more efficient to disallow single web pages and files.
Since SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) tasks are dynamic in nature, the needs of using robots.txt or RMT can vary in various contexts.
An RMT can be used along with its combination of various commands according to the arising needs. A robots.txt contains directives that may be used to control user-agents and their certain actions over a part of a website or over a complete website.
Therefore, in conclusion, it can be said that one can be used either or both as per the exigencies of the situations. Neither meta robots tag nor robots.txt file has any authority over the other.