Meta tags

Meta tags tell the robot how to load, index and display a page. Yandex takes account of a specific set, and its handling of conflicts is unusual enough to be worth learning.

The tags Yandex reads

• description — a source for the snippet description.
• keywords — Yandex states it “can influence the page’s relevance to search queries”. Unlike Google, it is not declared dead here.
• robots — loading and indexing rules.
• viewport — mobile adaptation. Without it, mobile browsers render for a desktop screen and then compensate by scaling or cropping, which is a mobile-friendliness failure caused by an omission rather than a design flaw.
• Content-Type — document type and encoding.
• refresh — with a small delay, treated as a temporary redirect equivalent to 302/303/307, and usable when moving a site.

The directives

Available in the robots meta tag or the X-Robots-Tag HTTP header:

• noindex — the page text is not indexed and the page stays out of results.
• nofollow — links are not followed, though the robot may learn of them elsewhere.
• none — both.
• noarchive — no saved-copy link in results.
• index, follow, archive, all — cancel prohibitions; these are the defaults and can be omitted.

The conflict rule that surprises people

Permissive directives take priority over prohibiting ones. A page carrying both all and noindex is indexed. This is the opposite of what most people assume, and it means a stray permissive tag left in a template silently overrides a deliberate exclusion.

Robot-specific tags

<meta name="yandex" ...> addresses Yandex robots only, and when both a general and a Yandex-specific tag are present Yandex applies both — robots: noindex plus yandex: nofollow is read as noindex, nofollow.

The precondition

If the page is blocked in robots.txt, none of this applies — the robot never fetches the page and never sees the directive.