Spiders & META Tags

[Pat Anderson]

I am trying to verify something which I thought I had
read previously on this list. Yes, I searched the archive,
and didn't find it.

My question is:

Are there any major web search engines, robots, spiders,
etc. (such as InfoSeek, Altavista, Yahoo, Excite, etc.)
which have decided *not* to index sites which use META tags?

I remember this being discussed in the context of using
a META tag to tell robots and spiders to "go away."

Our reason is that we want to use META tags to assign
subject terms for our web site for our own search engine,
but do not want to scare off any possible indexing by other
search engines. We want as many people as possible to find
the site. If META tags have been banned by a major web search
service due to abuse by poor web designers, then we will
find some other way to assign subject terms.

Thanks in advance for all your help!

Pat Anderson

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