Do I need robots.txt and meta robots?

[Nola504]

If I can manage to tell crawlers what I do and don't want them to crawl for my whole site via my robots.txt file, do I still need meta robots instructions?

[UnderRugSwept]

What do you mean by meta robots instructions? Are you referring to the meta tags that go on each individual page? In that case, no, you don't necessarily need them. Robots assume a page should be crawled unless told otherwise. I'd still do it for pages that you don't want indexed and/or followed because a lot of times, robots, especially Google, seem to ignore these directives.

[matbennett]

In short, no. You only need to include the instruction in one or the other.  Most people find that the robots.txt file is the preferred solution because it will only take a few lines to specify which parts of a well structured site should and should not be crawled.

[Alick300]

Hello Mat,

As far as I know if I blocked a url using robots.txt.For that page I will get only url in serps but i want to remove url from serps also.How to do that?

[matbennett]

If you want the stub listing removed as well, this is quite straight forward once you have it blocked in Robots. Instructions here: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1663419

Just checking though: If the content you are trying to remove is something private that should be hidden (as opposed to just low value stuff that you don't want cluttering the SERPS) then this isn't the right way to go about it.  If  that is the case reply back.

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Although robots.txt and meta robots appear to do similar things, they both serve different functions.

Block with Robots.txt - This tells the engines to not crawl the given URL but tells them that they may keep the page in the index and display it in in results.

Block with Meta NoIndex - This tells engines they can visit but they are not allowed to display the URL in results. (this is a suggestion only - Google may still choose to show the URL)

Source: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/robotstxt

The disadvantage of robots.txt is that it blocks Google from crawling the page, meaning no link juice can flow through the page, and if Google discovers the URL through other means (external links) it may show the URL anyway in search results, usually without a meta description.

The advantage of robots.txt is it can improve crawl efficiency - useful if you find Google crawling a bunch of unnecessary pages and eating up your crawl allowance.

Most of the time, I only use robots.txt to solve problems that I can't solve at the page level. I usually prefer to keep pages out of the index using a meta NOINDEX, FOLLOW tag.

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Older information, but mostly still relevant:

http://www.seobook.com/images/robotstxtgrid.png