Robots.txt vs Robots META tag

Does one over-rule the other?

[obsos]

Am having a problem with my site search engine appearing to disobey my robots.txt file ie it's indexing and displaying results from a directory disallowed in my robots.txt file.

Upon investigating, I found that the pages being indexed and displayed all have the "INDEX, FOLLOW" robots tag (a default for all our pages).

Does this metatag overrule the robots.txt file?

Or could there be some other explanation I have yet to determine?

[Matt Probert]

Any instructions contained within a robots.txt or within META tags, directed at spiders, are simply suggestions. It is completely up to the spider how it treats them. You need to contact the search engine in question and ask them what rules their spider follows (if any).

Matt

[ncw164x]

having a problem with my site search engine

If you are having problems with you own sites search engine then this could be down to the coding within the script used to search your site or on some search scripts you have the option on what to index on your site, both of these have got nothing to do with meta robots tag or your robots.txt file.