Ok, bear with me here. I have read a LOT of information on meta tags. Check out my site:
www.inspiredpetservices.com

According to Google:
"To entirely prevent a page's contents from being listed in the Google web index even if other sites link to it, use a noindex meta tag. As long as Googlebot fetches the page, it will see the noindex meta tag and prevent that page from showing up in the web index."

So, I think I only want my Index Page to show up in a search, not my Our Story, Why a Petsitter etc. Do I need to put a Custom Meta Tag (noindex) on all of the other pages?

Thanks,
CCW

Yes. If Googlebot or other bot discovers a single page by whatever means, this is the only way to tell them not to index that page.

Why would you not want the search engines to index your pages?

Looking at your website your doing it for business. You will be better off letting all the search engines index your pages so you have more chance of getting found.

Hi.

Bruceee:
Even if you use a Disallow in your robots.txt to inform Google not to index the pages, could they still index pages found via a direct link to that page from an outside domain, or does Google only index pages after it gets instruction either buy robot.txt or meta tags?

While we're on the subject I thought I would check this, I'm wondering which works best if you don't want a page indexed, robot.txt v's robot tags, or a combination of both.

It would be good to hear your take on this.

Cheers,
Tonga.

Google is a law unto itself, and who knows even whether something that it does this week will continue next week?

Noindex is a valid metatag, and it's also valid to use a disallow in the robots.txt file. If you are really concerned about not having certain pages indexed, then use both.

Google suggests to make a robots.txt file and upload it to your root directory. Search engines will search for this file and some say it makes your site more search engine friendly.

Here is my robots.txt for my site.

But as Bruce suggests who knows what google will do next.

Cheers for the help guys.

I only use robot text in my root directory at the moment but as Bruceee said I might as well use both on the pages I don't want found.

Thanks,
Tonga.