I have seen many articles and the like discussing proper use of the Robots Meta tag. It almost seems common knowledge of the purpose of this tag, but every now and then you find some confusion over its purpose and how it works.
Recently Vanessa Fox over at the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog posted exactly how Googlebot interprets this tag, and what it will do if it finds tags conflicting with the robots.txt file.
For anyone who has any level of confusion over the robots meta tag, this is a great, explanative 5 minute read.