Has Meta Robots reports whether RankGear recognizes a meta robots tag in the page’s rendered document head. It is a presence flag only — a 1 means a tag was found, a 0 means none was, and it says nothing about whether the directives inside allow or block indexing.
| Factor ID | RG-MET-006 |
|---|---|
| Family | Meta tags |
| Measurement | Boolean presence (0 / 1) |
| Measured zone | Rendered, script-free document head |
What it measures
Has Meta Robots indicates whether RankGear recognizes a meta robots tag in the document head. It reports presence only. It does not determine whether the directives permit or prevent indexing, so the flag answers “is a robots tag here?” and nothing more.
How RankGear measures it
RankGear lowercases the document head and looks for the literal opening sequence <meta name="robots. A recognized tag returns 1 and no recognized tag returns 0. Because the match is on that exact opening string, an unusual attribute order or alternative formatting may prevent detection even when a valid robots tag is present.
What RankGear looks for
<!-- matches (returns 1) -->
<meta name="robots" content="index, follow">
<meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow">
<!-- may NOT match (attribute order / formatting) -->
<meta content="noindex" name="robots">| Value | Meaning |
|---|---|
| 1 | A meta robots tag was recognized in the head. This does not mean the page is indexable — the tag could carry noindex. |
| 0 | No meta robots tag was recognized. The page may still rely on default crawler behavior or an HTTP X-Robots-Tag header, which this check does not see. |
How to optimize it
Treat this as an observation, not a target — adding a robots tag to raise the flag is pointless on its own. Add a robots tag only when a page needs explicit page-level crawler directives. When you do, confirm that directives such as index, noindex, follow, nofollow, snippet controls, and preview settings match the page’s intended search behavior.
Important considerations
- A score of 1 is not inherently good. A
noindextag can intentionally remove a page from search, and it still reads as a 1 here. - The factor does not read or validate directive values — only whether a tag is present.
- HTTP
X-Robots-Tagheaders are not represented by this check, so a page can be governed by robots directives while scoring 0. - Never add or change directives solely to match competitors.
- Presence correlates with, and does not cause, position within a measured result set; this is a prioritization and diagnostic signal, not a guarantee of ranking.
Related factors
Part of the Factors reference · how RankGear measures · glossary.