Author meta-tag
The author meta-tag simply allows you to name the author of the
content on the page. It serves no purpose from a search engine
optimisation point of view, but is often used for sites that allow their
content to be used under license to make crediting the author easier.
Robots meta-tag
The robots meta-tag allows you to tell search engines whether or not
to index or archive your page, and whether or not to follow any links
they find on your page. By default, all search engines will index and
archive your page, and follow all links on the page, to find other pages
to index and archive. If, however, you have pages on your site you don't
want indexed, or you don't want the search engines to follow the links
on your page, you can tell them not to with this tag:
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow">
You may want a page with highly controversial or adult content not to
be indexed, so that the rest of your site won't be penalised, or you may
want a links page to get a "nofollow" attribute, so that your site can
maximise its PageRank.
Some search engines also recognise variations of the robots meta-tag
that only apply to that search engine; for example Google will recognise
the GoogleBot meta-tag as a robots meta-tag, but no other search engine
will. This allows you to specifically restrict Google's indexing your
site.
Other meta-tags
There are many other meta-tags registered, but most will only be
recognised by specific programs. Microsoft, for example, recognises a
wide range of other meta-tags like build, client, checked by, etc. but
these should only be used by HTML pages created in MS-Word, and intended
to be read by MS-Word. You can safely ignore all these meta-tags. Stick
to the three main meta-tags, and the robots meta-tag to restrict search
engine indexing, and you should be fine.
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