Defaults for robots meta tag

Question

If I don't specify a robots meta tag in the head of the document, the defaults are:

<meta name="robots" content="index,follow">

My question is, if I only specify "noindex", is the default still "follow"? So if I specify this below, is the default still follow?

<meta name="robots" content="noindex">

Answer 1

While "noindex" would be the same as "noindex,follow", it is important to note, that a long-term noindex will lead to "noindex,nofollow"; regardless of the specified follow-value. Although this is only valid for Google, i guess this is not what you intend.

some source: https://blog.seoprofiler.com/google-noindexfollow-noindexnofollow-long-run/ (or just google for "long term noindex"

Answer 2

Yes, by only specifying the noindex, it will still be follow. More information can be found [here]{https://developers.google.com/webmasters/control-crawl-index/docs/robots_meta_tag}