The purpose of the previously mentioned search "spiders" is to find your page, index it, search it for links to other pages, follow those links, and perform the same actions again. Usually, this is a good thing, as people want their pages to be indexed, as well as the pages it links to. There are times when this is not desired, which is why the META No Index and META No Follow settings were created.
- The META No Index setting will alert the bot that it should ignore and not index the page.
- The META No Follow setting will alert the bot that it should not process nor follow links on the page.
These settings can be used separately, or together. Note that using one does not automatically imply the other. (In SchoolStatus, though, these two are combined in the page properties, so both will be enabled or disabled.)
Please note that not all bots will properly recognize these settings. Bots from more well-known and respected search engines will most likely correctly check these settings and handle them properly. Improperly programmed bots may simply ignore these settings and continue on processing your page no matter what.