The meta robots tag is a meta tag that communicates to search engine crawlers regarding the crawling and indexing of a webpage. It tells whether to index a page, whether to follow the links on the page, and also whether to display the page in search results. The meta robots tag is powerful in determining how search engines treat your website. It would not just apply to preventing duplicate content indexing but would even preclude certain pages from being accessed or definitely halts search engines from following certain links on particular pages.