: Can the content attribute of be left empty? Is <meta name="robots" content="" /> a legitimate meta, exactly equivalent to: <meta name="robots" content="index, follow" /> <meta name="robots"

@Shakeerah822

option 3. Nothing is by far the best approach.


If you mean that the robots tag should be omitted entirely, then yes, that would be the best option if you want the page to be indexed and followed.

The other options just add superfluous bytes and will be ignored.

As mentioned in my answer to your other related question, Google only includes all (out of what you have posted) in its list of valid directives. But as Google states, "this has no effect" anyway, as this is the default value. Google (and I suspect all search engine bots) simply ignore index, follow - since this is again the default behavior.


<meta name="robots" content="" />



An empty content attribute is valid HTML. However, it contains no directive, so can only be ignored (as stated above).

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