Tell search engine not to follow the links

Question

I just need clarification about:

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

It is clear that By including this in head content at page level will tell search engine not to follow the links which are in this page.

Now, will it also include the page in the "nofollow" zone in which this is written?

Answer 1

To exclude the page from search engine index where you have written:

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

You also need to add the noindex directive to hint search engine bots NOT to index the page like this:

<meta name="robots" content="nofollow,noindex"/>

To make it further clear, there are four implementations of the Robots meta tags for search engine bots:

1.

 <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW">

This simply means: "Do not index this page and do not follow the links on the page." So, your page will drop out of the search engine index and your external links on the page will not be followed (link juice will NOT be transferred).

2.

  <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="INDEX, NOFOLLOW">

This simply means: "Do index this page but do not follow the links on the page." So, your page will get indexed by search engines and your external links present on the page will not be followed (link juice will NOT be transferred).

3.

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, FOLLOW">

This simply means: "Do not index this page and do follow the links on the page." So, your page will drop out of the search engine index but your external links present on the page will be followed (link juice will be transferred to external links).

4.

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="INDEX, FOLLOW">

This simply means: "Do index this page and do follow the external links on the page." So, your page will be included in the search engine index and your external links present on the page will be followed (link juice will be transferred).

Answer 2

The meta tag nofollow is just for the links in the page. To include the page where is written you have to include noindex and noarchive tag.

<meta name="robots" content="noindex,noarchive,nofollow"/>