It looks like it's too late for me to edit my comment, but I've been proved right. Putting a Noindex directive directly in robots.txt is frequently suggested, b

It looks like it's too late for me to edit my comment, but I've been proved right. Putting a Noindex directive directly in robots.txt is frequently suggested, but this seems like definitive proof that that does nothing (at least with Google). As far as I can tell the inception of this idea was that it was briefly mentioned by some Google employee in an interview. Maybe it was supported in the past or maybe he just misspoke, but I bet even now we'll see people still using this tag.