How to discourage Googlebots

Has anyone had any experience with getting Google’s web crawlers off the scent when they seem to have picked up your url?

I have about 6 devices that have somehow got onto Google’s database for crawling.

I’m going to try putting

in the html for the root, but there’s no guarantee that I will return html.

I could try returning something when google or another crawler tries

https://www.agent.electricimp.com/agenturl/robots.txt

Is this known to work?

Your suggested HTML was eaten by the forums. What did you put in there?

Bit disturbing that they have been found. My guess: Chrome submits all URLs you visit to google…?

The html was (with <> encapsulation)
meta name=‘Googlebot’ content=‘nofollow’ /

Not all of the devices get crawled, only a subset. I don’t know how google got wind of them. I want google to “forget” the urls, rather than not crawl them

We added a robots.txt to the root of agents.electricimp.com by the way - Google seems to have honored it and stopped displaying the few agent URLs that were indexed.