Meta Robots Tag - What's it really mean?

[mudbugmedia]

I used on a handful of pages recently and noticed that they're still popping up in the Google search index. I'd like to keep these from appearing, so I figured I needed a directive statement with stronger semantic meaning.

From what I understand, is what I'm looking for. Using this will keep Google from not only crawling the page, but indexing the page, as well.

I decided to see what the official robotstxt.org website said about it, so I checked (link here):

the NOFOLLOW directive only applies to links on this page. It's entirely likely that a robot might find the same links on some other page without a NOFOLLOW (perhaps on some other site), and so still arrives at your undesired page.

So, is their explanation saying that the page itself will be indexed, but the content / links on it won't be followed / indexed? Let me hear your thoughts, mozzers.

[Theo-NL]

You can find out your desired meta robots setting by asking yourself two questions:

noindex or index: do you want this particular page to show up as a listing in the Google results for a query? Yes: index, No: noindex.

nofollow or follow: do you want the links on this page to be crawled (followed) by the search engine robots, thereby allowing them access to the deeper pages it links to (even though that particular page might even be noindexed). Yes: follow, No: nofollow