List of Meta Tags That Google Supports and Understands

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Meta Tags are an excellent way to tell the search engines about the content displayed in your webpages. Meta means data about data so meta tags play an important role in providing more data about the content displayed on the web pages. This post will provide details about the meta tags that are supported by Google. You may use these meta tags in order to enable Google to better understand the contents of any webpages.


Make sure to use these meta tags as per the needs of your website. Incorrect use of the above tags might prove disastrous for the online visibility of your website.




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Meta Tags List Supported by Google


Meta Tag
Name
Syntax Purpose
Title <title>The
Title of the Page</title>
This
tag contains the title of the web page. Google displays the contents of this
tag in the search snippet.
Description <meta
name=”description” content=”A description of the page”
/>
This
tag contains a short description of the web page. Google displays the
contents of this tag in the search snippet.
Robots <meta
name=”robots” content=”…, …” />
This
tag controls the behavior of the search engines. Any webpages can be
prevented from crawling and indexing by the use of this tag. The mata robots
tag is followed by all the search engines including Google.
Googlebot <meta
name=”googlebot” content=”…, …” />
This
tag is similar to the robots tag with the difference that this tag is created
specifically for the googlebot. This means the other search engines will
ignore the contents of this tag.
Google <meta
name=”google” content=”notranslate” />
This
tag will disallow Google to provide a translation to the webpage if Google
detects that web page’s content is in other language that what the user
browser behavior, location and language settings suggest. 
Google Site Verification <meta
name=”google-site-verification” content=”…” />
This
tag enables Google to associate the webpage with a particular Google
Webmasters account.
Content Type <meta
http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”…; charset=…”
/> <meta charset=”…” >
This
tag defines the page’s content type and character set.
Refresh <meta
http-equiv=”refresh” content=”…;url=…” />
This tag tells the
browsers to redirect users to a different URL after a certain amount of time.
Google does not recommends the use of this tag and prefers

Attributes Supported by the Robots Tag
Attribute Example Description
noindex:  <meta
name=”robots” content=”noindex”>
prevents
the page from being indexed
nofollow:  <meta
name=”robots” content=”nofollow” />
prevents
the Googlebot from following links from this page
nosnippet:  <meta
name=”googlebot” content=”nosnippet”>
prevents
a snippet from being shown in the search results
noodp:  <meta
name=”robots” content=”NOODP”>
prevents
the alternative description from the ODP/DMOZ from being used
noarchive:  <META
NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOARCHIVE”>
prevents
Google from showing the Cached link for a page.
unavailable_after:[date]:  <META
NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”unavailable_after: 25-Aug-2007 15:00:00
EST”>
lets
you specify the exact time and date you want to stop crawling and indexing of
this page
noimageindex: <META
NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”noimageindex”>
lets
you specify that you do not want your page to appear as the referring page
for an image that appears in Google search results.
none:  <META
NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”none”>
is
equivalent to noindex, nofollow.

Also See:

List of Meta Tags