noindex and nofollow get most of the attention, and rightly so — they're the directives that control whether a page appears in search results at all. But the meta robots tag supports several more targeted directives that are useful when a page should be indexed, just not shown or archived in a specific way.
Controlling how much shows in the search result itself
nosnippet tells search engines not to show a text snippet or video preview for the page at all. max-snippet:N caps how long a text snippet can be. noimageindex keeps a page's images out of image search results specifically, without affecting the page's own indexing. These are useful when a page is fine to rank, but you don't want its content previewed in full before someone clicks through.
noarchive matters more for time-sensitive content
noarchive prevents search engines from keeping and serving a cached copy of the page — relevant for pages with pricing, availability, or other information that changes and where a stale cached version could mislead someone.
TeckForge's Meta Robots Tag Generator builds a correctly-formatted meta robots tag from checkboxes covering all of these directives, so you don't have to remember the exact comma-separated syntax each time.
