Will a robots noindex meta tag completely prevent search engines from indexing a page?

Question

I am wondering if meta tag <meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow"> will completely prevent a website page from being indexed.

What if user has registered website from Google Webmaster console will noindex still prevent google from indexing this page?

What if the website has sitemap which is submitted to Google using search console, will noindex still stop google from indexing website pages?

I would like clarity as to the precedence that takes place in these situations.

If the tag were instead<meta name="robots" content="index,follow">, what will happen in that case?

Answer 1

A robots meta tag with noindex will prevent Google from indexing a page. The meta tag takes precedence over:

• Search console account: Registering for search console will show you additional information about how Google views your site, but it doesn't affect whether or not it is indexed.
• Inclusion in an XML sitemap: Including a noindex page in a sitemap will not cause the page to get indexed. It will cause Google to report a problem with the sitemap in Google Search Console.

A robots meta tag does NOT take precedence over robots.txt. If you disallow a page in robots.txt and also include the meta tag, Googlebot will not crawl the page. It won't be able to see the meta tag. As a result, the disallowed page may still get indexed in some (fairly rare) circumstances.

Answer 2

You can simply change the meta tag. If the meta tag is the same on all pages, probably it should be <meta name="robots" content="index,follow"> on each page so that the website be indexed completely as you have a sitemap already.