Good morning and sorry for that beginnerish question,
but I was wondering if unlisted pages get indexed anyway by search engines,
especially when they contain a meta tag like
<meta name="robots" content="index,follow" />?
Unlisted does not mean unfindable - if you know the URL, you can reach it, and if you can, google probably can.
There are several robots and sitemap plugins out there that you can use to control what search engines list.
As long as you link to your unlisted pages within your site, Google’s crawlers will find them by following the link in the same way they find listed pages.
The only difference between listed and unlisted pages is that the listed ones have numbers you can sort by while the unlisted ones haven’t. By implications, this also means, that if your listed pages are not linked in a menu, or text, they won’t be crawled either.
Many thanks to both of You! This helped! 