Google generally honors the request not to actually crawl these pages, but if they’re linked to FROM crawlable pages, they’ll sometimes be indexed even though their actual content was not viewed. The description in the searching listing will generally say A description for this result is not available because of this site’s robots.txt when this is the case. Use a meta robots HTML tag set to noindex if you don’t want a page indexed.
Contributors: Mark Brown from The Zebra