Is Googlebot ignoring directives? Or is it Me?

[loopyal]

I saw an answer to a question in this forum a few days ago, that said it was a bad idea to use robots.txt to tell googlebot to go away.

That SEO said it was much better to use the META tag to say noindex,nofollow.

So I removed the robots directive and added the META tag

<meta robots='noindex,nofollow'>

Today, I see google showing my send to a friend page where I expected the real page to be.

Does it mean Google is stupid?

Does it mean google ignores the Robots META tag?

Does it mean short pages have more value than long pages?

Does it mean if I convert my whole site to snippets, I'll get more traffic?

Does it mean garbage trumps content?

I have more questions, but this is more than enough.

[loopyal]

Thank you Ryan.

They completely ignored the meta tags., completely messing up our serps. So I put it back in robots. I wont trust google again to do the right thing.

[RyanKent]

Hi Allan,

It is a best practice to use meta tags to indicate your indexing preference to search engines.

Normally the recommended implementation would be "noindex, follow" but without examining your site it is impossible to know for sure.

Google honors meta tags but there are a number of issues which could be the source of your issue. For example, if you did not use valid syntax the tag may not be honored. If you are blocking the page in robots.txt, then search engines cannot read the tag.

As for the last three questions, the simple answer is quality content is best.

If you can share the URL of the page involved, we can offer a specific response to the implementation of the meta tag.