The robots meta tag allows two things: to indicate to the search engine that it should not index a content, but also (and in a complementary way) that the robot should not follow the links encountered in this content. Either of these two options is possible.
To index everything:
Two possible methods:
Do not put a robots meta tag, or
Use one of the 2 following syntaxes:
To not index, but follow the links:
To index but not follow links:
To not index AND not follow links:
On the one hand, in practice, the "nofollow" attribute is used very little because it has very little impact. On the other hand, the "noindex" attribute is very useful because it allows us to deindex low SEO impact pages.
During a technical audit, or by using a crawler, you can check the URLs’ list on a website which contains a robots meta tag in noindex.
Consult the list to verify that all the URLs present must indeed be in noindex.
If you find pages in noindex when they should be indexed: contact your technical team to modify or remove the tag, so that the page is indexable again. Also check your robots.txt file at the same time.
Now you’ve identified your noindex tags and can move on!
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