I've had conflicting advice on whether or not I should use <meta name="robots" content="index,follow">. Opinions?
There's nothing explicitly wrong with using "index,follow". It's just that those are the defaults for search engines, so they have no practical effect.
rainborick is on the money -- those are the DEFAULTS, so why would you waste bandwidth saying it in the markup? That's just as idiotic when it comes to code bloat as putting a TITLE on a anchor that's identical to the anchor's content. (unless you happen to be writing an accesskeys menu).. or putting the same class on every LI in a list. UNLESS you are trying to bypass a robots.txt - but since that is typically read FIRST, they shouldn't even get as far as the markup in that case. So no! Relax, don't do it. When you want to go through it...
Wow, sounds great@ Let's have a look, what to use: Either index,follow or index,nofollow If you choose index,follow, means search engines will follow the articles containing index,follow tag. Or If you choose index,nofollow, then Search Engines will not be able to follow the articles containing index,nofollow tag.
Uhm... NO! There is no value called INDEX, there is no value called FOLLOW. It's NOINDEX and NOFOLLOW. Those are really the only two that should be ever used... index,nofollow is just as wasteful because index is the DEFAULT. Don't waste time saying the DEFAULT!