Should I remove meta-robots (index, follow) when I have a robots.txt?

Question

I\'m a bit confused whether I should remove the robots meta tag, if I want search engines to follow my robots.txt rules.

If the robots meta-tag (index, follow) exist

Answer 1

If a search engine’s bot honors your robots.txt, and you disallow crawling of /foo, then the bot will never crawl pages whose URL paths start with /foo. Hence the bot will never know that there are meta-robots elements.

Conversely, this means that if you want to disallow indexing a page (by specyfing meta-robots with noindex), you should not disallow crawling of this page in your robots.txt. Otherwise the noindex is never accessed, and the bot thinks that crawling is forbidden, not indexing.