Which is better..?

[gunjanjain]

Hello friends,

Which is better — Meta Robot tags or robots.txt?

[naksh]

It's a pretty common misconception that the robots.txt will prevent indexing. It's only purpose is actually to prevent crawling, anything disallowed in there is still up for indexing if it's linked to elsewhere. If you want something deindexed, your best bet is the robots meta tag, but make sure you allow crawling of the URLs to give search engine bots an opportunity to see the tag.

[sulbha]

Robots.txt dictates site or directory-wide crawl behavior, whereas meta robots can dictate indexation behavior at the individual page level.

[RH-Calvin]

Robots.txt is better compared to meta robots tag. Robots.txt is a text file that lists webpages which contain instructions for search engines robots. The file lists webpages that are allowed and disallowed from search engine crawling.

[traveloweb]

The Meta tag option tells bots not to index individual files, whereas Robots.txt can be used to restrict access to entire directories.
Use a Meta tag if you have the odd page in indexed folders that you want skipping, but generally, I'd recommend you most of your non-indexed content in one or more folders and use robots.txt to skip the lot.