I've found a site where one meta tag is looking like that:
<meta name="”robots”" content="”noindex,nofollow”">
Please not that the values for both attributes is additionally enclosed in typographical quotation marks: "” ... ”".
While wondering if that is legal, I've checked with a SEO-checking page which is saying that the page is using indeed the noindex tag.
My question: who is right? Are the typographical quotation marks ignored? I could not really find a good answer while googling.
The typographic quotes are part of the attribute value.
The documentation from Google describes the values robots (for the name attribute) and noindex and follow (for the content attribute) and says that "Multiple directives may be combined in a comma-separated list".
It does not describe the values ”robots”, ”noindex or nofollow”
Some clients may ignore ” characters. I would not assume that all or even many will. I wouldn't trust a syntax checker that didn't pick up on them as an error.