What to do about "blocked by meta-robots"?

[GPN]

The crawl report tells me "Notices are interesting facts about your pages we found while crawling". One of these interesting facts is that my blog archives are "blocked by meta robots".

Articles are not blocked, just the archives.

What is a "meta" robot?

I think its just normal (since the article need only be crawled once) but want a second opinion. Should I care about this?

[RyanKent]

In general, there are two ways you can block crawlers from indexing your content.

• You can add a Disallow entry to your robots.txt file

• You can add a meta tag to your pages:

What you are saying in either case is "please do not list this content in your search engine".

In general, you would not want to block your archives. There certainly can be specific cases where you only want the public to see your most current content, in which case you can block it.

[AlanBleiweiss]

Meta robots refers to the < meta name="robots" > tag at the page header level.  This is usually the case when a blog is set up with an SEO program like All In One SEO for example, where you can manually set which content is blocked.  It's common to block archives, tags, and other sections, in the theory that allowing these to be crawled could either cause duplicate content issues, or drain link value from the primary category navigation.