i have a site map...which i want spidered, but i do NOT want it indexed, as it will probably end up outranking most of the pages listed on it. do all the SE's definately observe the NO-INDEX meta? i am sure i have heard stories of people having pages indexed that they didn't want indexed any help appreciated in this matter Solicitors Mortgages
Nope. I've seen pages that were indexed with that Meta tag. They sometimes show up in the site's page index without any description. However, I have not seen any of these pages show up in the SERPs. If you want the links on the page spidered, but you don't want the page indexed, that may still be your best option. If you try to block the page in the robots.txt file, the links may not get spidered, which defeats the purpose for a Site Map.
AFAIK, the search engines *do* respect the tag. *But*, if the page is also disallowed via robots.txt, the search engines will never read the meta tag, so a listing sans title/description may appear in the SERPs.
i want it spidered and all the subsequent pages indexed... but not the site map. when someone searches, i want them to land at an actual page full of content, not at my sitemap. the sitemap may not feature, even if it's indexed, as it won't have much PR...however if i link to it off of my homepage...it might just inherit a PR3 ...and then may be returned in serp's.