What’s the difference between the robots.txt file and a noindex meta tag? Both of these tags are designed to tell the search engine crawlers to “not index” a URL on a website. But are they really the same? In many situations, adding a disallow directive in the robots.txt file will have the same effect as using a meta noindex tag on a web page. But, there are times when you should NOT use the robots.txt file and use the meta noindex tag, instead. Let’s look at the differences.