The meta robots tag is a tag that was designed especially for guiding the search engine on how you would like your website to be indexed, there is an alternative method for stopping search engines from indexing a page called the robots.txt file but that is covered in search engines 101 section of this website (under build).

As for the meta robots tag, it is usually used in a different way rather than stopping search engines from indexing you ask a search engine to index in the stated manner. A tag like with the following parameters name="ROBOTS" content="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW"  tells the search engines not to index the current page and not to follow the links on it, this is technically covered in search engines 101

Meta refresh tags are somehow bad as well, the following tag is a redirector to another page, Usually you will have no content on the current page and you are placing it to take the user to the probably alternative new page you have made, Not only do most search engines not follow the link, they will also probably not index the current one, so i would suggest having the link for the visitor to click on rather than automatically redirecting him, That will also increase your link popularity. The example tag we have sends the user to a new page after 0 seconds from finishing loading the page (if a banner for example on your page will not load the redirection could take a while until the connection times out).
<Meta http-equiv="Refresh" content="0;URL=http://www.domainname.net/foldername/filename.HTML">