seo - Should I remove meta-robots (index, follow) when I have a robots.txt?

Question

I'm a bit confused whether I should remove the robots meta tag, if I want search engines to follow my robots.txt rules.

If the robots meta-tag (index, follow) exists on the page, will search engines then ignore my robots.txt file and index the specified disallowed URLs in my robots.txt anyway?

The reason why I'm asking about this, is that search engines (Google mainly) still indexes disallowed pages from my website.

Answer 1

If a search engine’s bot honors your robots.txt, and you disallow crawling of /foo, then the bot will never crawl pages whose URL paths start with /foo. Hence the bot will never know that there are meta-robots elements.

Conversely, this means that if you want to disallow indexing a page (by specyfing meta-robots with noindex), you should not disallow crawling of this page in your robots.txt. Otherwise the noindex is never accessed, and the bot thinks that crawling is forbidden, not indexing.