meta
tags and attributes that Google supports
This page explains what meta
tags are, which meta
tags and HTML
attributes Google supports to control indexing, and other important points to note when
implementing meta
tags on your site.
meta
tags
meta
tags are HTML tags used to provide additional information about a page to
search engines and other clients. Clients process the meta
tags and ignore those they don't
support. meta
tags are added to the <head>
section of
your HTML page and generally look like this:
<!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <meta charset="utf-8"> <meta name="description" content="Author: A.N. Author, Illustrator: P. Picture, Category: Books, Price: £9.24, Length: 784 pages"> <meta name="google-site-verification" content="+nxGUDJ4QpAZ5l9Bsjdi102tLVC21AIh5d1Nl23908vVuFHs34="> <title>Example Books - high-quality used books for children</title> <meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow"> </head> </html>
Google supports the following meta
tags:
List of meta tags that Google supports | |
---|---|
description |
<meta name="description" content="A description of the page">Use this tag to provide a short description of the page. In some situations, this description is used in the snippet shown in search results. |
robots and googlebot |
<meta name="robots" content="..., ..."> <meta name="googlebot" content="..., ...">
These The In the case of conflicting The default values are You can also specify this information in the header of your pages using the
|
nositelinkssearchbox |
<meta name="google" content="nositelinkssearchbox"> When users search for your site, Google Search results sometimes display a search box specific to your site, along with other direct links to your site. This tag tells Google not to show the sitelinks search box. Learn more about sitelinks search box. |
notranslate |
<meta name="googlebot" content="notranslate">
When Google recognizes that the contents of a page aren't in the language that the
user likely wants to read, Google may provide a translated title link and snippet in search results.
If the user clicks the translated title link, all further user interaction with the page
is through Google Translate, which will automatically translate any links followed. In
general, this gives you the chance to provide your unique and
compelling content to a much larger group of users. However, there may be situations
where this is not desired. This |
nopagereadaloud |
<meta name="google" content="nopagereadaloud"> Prevents various Google text-to-speech services from reading aloud web pages using text-to-speech (TTS). |
google-site-verification |
<meta name="google-site-verification" content="...">
You can use this tag on the top-level page of your site to verify ownership for Search Console.
Note that while the values of the |
Content-Type and charset |
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="...; charset=..."> <meta charset="...">
These tags define the page's content type and character set respectively. Make sure that you
surround the value of the |
refresh |
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="...;url=...">
This tag, commonly called meta-refresh, sends the user to a new URL after a certain
amount of time, and is sometimes used as a simple form of redirection. However, it is
not supported by all browsers and can be confusing to the user.
We recommend using a server-side
|
viewport |
<meta name="viewport" content="...">
This tag tells the browser how to render a page on a mobile device. Presence of this tag
indicates to Google that the page is mobile friendly.
Read more about how to configure the |
rating |
<meta name="rating" content="adult"> <meta name="rating" content="RTA-5042-1996-1400-1577-RTA"> Labels a page as containing sexually-explicit adult content, to signal that it be filtered by SafeSearch results. Learn more about labeling SafeSearch pages. |
HTML tag attributes
HTML tag attributes
are additional values of HTML tags that configure the parent tag. For example, the
href
attribute of the <a>
tag configures the resource the anchor
tag points to: <a href="https://example.com/"...>
.
Google Search supports a limited number of HTML attributes for indexing purposes. Attributes
like src
and href
are used for discovering resources such as images
and URLs. Google also supports various
rel
attributes
that allow site owners to qualify outbound links.
The
data-nosnippet
attribute
of div
, span
, and section
tags allow you to exclude
parts of an HTML page from snippets.
Other points to note
-
Google can read both HTML and XHTML-style
meta
tags, regardless of the code used on the page. -
To ensure machine readability, the
head
section must be valid HTML and in case of attributes, all parent tags closed accordingly. -
With the exception of
google-site-verification
, letter case is generally not important inmeta
tags. -
You can use other
meta
tags if they are important to your site, but Google will ignoremeta
tags that it doesn't support. -
If you're considering using JavaScript to inject or change
meta
tags, proceed with caution. We recommend that you avoid using JavaScript to inject or changemeta
tags whenever possible, and if you must use it, test your implementations thoroughly. -
To check the
meta
tags and attributes on your pages, use the URL Inspection Tool.
Unsupported tags and attributes
The following tags and attributes aren't supported by Google Search and are ignored. We're including them here because they're either very common in HTML or we used to support them.
Unsupported tags and attributes | |
---|---|
meta-keyword tag |
<meta name="keywords" content="...">
The meta-keyword tag is not used by Google Search, and it has no effect on indexing and
ranking at all. |
HTML tag lang attributes |
Google Search detects the language of a page
based on the textual content of the page. It doesn't rely on code annotations such as the
lang . |
next and prev rel attribute values
|
<link rel="next" href="..."> <link rel="prev" href="...">
Google no longer uses these HTML |