Precedence of X-Robots-Tag header vs robots meta tag

Question

I\'ve placed the following Header in my vhost config:

Header set X-Robots-Tag \"noindex, nofollow\"

The goal here is to just disab

Answer 1

In my recent experience, when Google sees mixed-messages it prefers positive action by default - ie - it favours indexing - meanwhile will flag the issue as a critical error/warning in your webmaster tools console if you have one.

see your site's status in google here: https://www.google.com/webmasters/

see you site's status in bing here: http://www.bing.com/toolbox/webmaster (note that yahoo search is now powered by bing)

Google takes this positive-by-default action because lots of site owners unwittingly have a dodgy cms semi-blocking robots and we know how google loves to accumulate as much data as it can - any excuse!

if the technical settings are erroneous they're liable to be totally disregarded, and we know how search engines index and follow by default when no settings are specified.