Google SEO: Robots Meta Tag

OK – So I’ve theorised about the Title Element, the Meta Description Tag and
the pointless Meta Keywords Tag. Next:
The Robots Meta Tag;
<meta name="robots" content="index, nofollow" />
I could use the above meta tag to tell Google to index the page but not
to follow any links on the page, if for some reason; I did not want the page to
appear in Google search results.
By default, Googlebot will index a page and follow links to it. So there’s no
need to tag pages with content values of INDEX or FOLLOW. GOOGLE
There are various instructions you can make use of in your Robots Meta Tag,
but remember Google by default WILL index and follow links, so you have NO
need to include that as a command – you can leave the robots meta out
completely – and probably should if you don’t have a clue.
Googlebot understands any combination of lowercase and
uppercase. GOOGLE.
Valid values for Robots Meta Tag ”CONTENT” attribute are: “INDEX“, “NOINDEX“,
“FOLLOW“, “NOFOLLOW“. Pretty self-explanatory.
Examples:
  META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOINDEX, FOLLOW”
  META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”INDEX, NOFOLLOW”
  META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW”
  META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOARCHIVE”
  META NAME=”GOOGLEBOT” CONTENT=”NOSNIPPET”
  Google will understand the following and interprets the following robots
meta tag values:
  NOINDEX - prevents the page from being included in the index.
  NOFOLLOW - prevents Googlebot from following any links on the page. (Note
that this is different from the link-level NOFOLLOW attribute, which prevents
Googlebot from following an individual link.)
  NOARCHIVE - prevents a cached copy of this page from being available in the
search results.
  NOSNIPPET - prevents a description from appearing below the page in the
search results, as well as prevents caching of the page.
  NOODP - blocks the Open Directory Project description of the page from being
used in the description that appears below the page in the search results.
  NONE - equivalent to “NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW”.

Robots META Tag Quick Reference

Terms  Googlebot  Slurp  MSNBot  Teoma
NoIndex  YES  YES  YES  YES
NoFollow  YES  YES  YES  YES
NoArchive  YES  YES  YES  YES
NoSnippet  YES  NO  NO  NO
NoODP  YES  YES  YES  NO
NoYDIR  NO  YES  NO  NO
NoImageIndex  YES  NO  NO  NO
NoTranslate  YES  NO  NO  NO
Unavailable_After  YES  NO  NO  NO
I’ve included the robots meta tag in my tutorial as this is one of only a few
meta tags / html head elements I focus on when it comes to Google (and
Bing) seo. At a page level – it is quite powerful.
1.  Title Element – Important – Unique
2.  Meta Description (optional but advisable in most cases) – Unique
3.  Robots Meta Tag (optional) – Be Careful
4.  Canonical Meta Tag (optional – recommended) – Be Vigilant
If you are interested in using methods like on-page robots instructions and the
robots.txt file to control which pages get indexed by Google and how Google
treats them, Sebastian knows a lot more than me