A set of pages are marked as noindex and nofollow, both in robots.txt and with X-Robots-Tag: noindex, nofollow When checking with Google Webmaster Tools, the pages are reported as Denied by robots.txt, which is nice. Also, as mentioned in this answer, disallowed pages may still be indexed even if not technically crawled, cause that's how Google rolls.However, after adding the Robots-Tag two weeks ago, the pages still appears in Google search results. For example, this test page http://www.english-attack.com/profile/scott-s-sober is found when searching for its h1 title Scott S. Sober https://www.google.com/search?q=%22Scott+S.+Sober%22 Why is this?
How long does it take for Google to remove page from index? Or, why aren't these pages excluded?
google search console;google search;robots.txt;googlebot
The cause of the problem is that Google is not seeing the newly added X-Robots-Tag because it's not re-indexing the page. Removing the ban from robots.txt and letting Google fetch the pages with their headers does remove the pages from the results. 