What is the purpose of the "robots" meta tag in HTML?

What is the followin开发者_JAVA百科g <meta> tag used for in HTML:

<meta http-equiv="robots" content="no-cache" />

Does robots mean a HTML tag name for which the cache is not done in the above example?

if you ask google for that meta-tag, this is the first hit - describing a lot of things about meta-tags, and has also a paragraph about the robot-tags (which are instructions for search-engines). please try to ask google and the stackoverflow-seach before posting a questions thats so easy to find out yourself.

in addition: "no-cache" seems to be senseless in a rotobs-metatag, there should only be "index", "follow", "noindex" or "nofollow" or a combination of these like "noindex, follow". the meta-tag to tell the browser it shouldn't cache the site is

<meta http-equiv="pragma" content="nocache">
                   ^not "robots"    ^without "-"

where have you got your example from?

The http-equiv attribute is used to specify the header type for the value of the content attribute; it can be used to simulate an HTTP header. I don't think name and http-equiv are exchangeable in general, but I have seen "robots" used with both, e.g.:

<meta name="robots" content="no-cache" />

Here's a randomly-selected Google result with a list of meta names having to do with robots. There's also this page about common meta tags that may provide some insight; I'm not entirely sure what you're looking for with your question.

The tag provides metadata about the HTML document. Metadata will not be displayed on the page, but will be machine parsable. Meta elements are typically used to specify page description, keywords, author of the document, last modified, and other metadata.

Metadata is information about data.

for eg, The following meta element defines keywords for a page:

<meta name="keywords" content="HTML, CSS, XML" />