Q and A: Will search engines obey the robots.txt if a robots meta tag is used per page?

Dear Kalena...

I am running a CMS (joomla) and have robots.txt configured for the pages I want indexed. however, I noticed that the CMS is automatically appending the meta robots tag (index, follow) to every single page - yikes! So my question is, will Googlebot respect robots.txt or be led astray by the meta robots tag?

Thank you!
AP Clarke

Kalena's Answer:

Dear AP

I think Joomla has an option of turning off the automatic tag appending. Search engines usually follow robots.txt in the first instance, but some will obey the robots meta tag per page, so if you don't want to risk confusing search bots, try to turn off that meta robots tag option or manually delete it from the code after publishing.

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