Page Rank Question with Meta Robots

[OLYMPOS]

I have a question please. I have made a search on WPW but could not find an answer, i hope this is the "right" topic for my question...

The question is:

If a website has in the header <meta name="ROBOTS" content="INDEX, NOFOLLOW" />

but there are external links on the site, what will happen to the pagerank if the link itself is "normal" and does NOT contain the rel="nofollow" tag in the <a href=""> tag???

All your thoughts are appreciated!

kind regards
olympos

[Webnauts]

Matt Cutts, Google Engineer said at his interview with Eric Enge:

Matt Cutts: Absolutely. So, we really conceive of NoFollow as a pretty general mechanism. The name, NoFollow, is meant to mirror the fact that it's also a metatag. As a metatag NoFollow means don't crawl any links from this entire page.
NoFollow as an individual link attribute means don't follow this particular link, and so it really just extends that granularity down to the link level.
We did an interview with Rand Fishkin over at SEOmoz where we talked about the fact that NoFollow was a perfectly acceptable tool to use in addition to robots.txt. NoIndex and NoFollow as a metatag can change how Googlebot crawls your site. It's important to realize that typically these things are more of a second order effect. What matters the most is to have a great site and to make sure that people know about it, but, once you have a certain amount of PageRank, these tools let you choose how to develop PageRank amongst your pages.



More: Matt Cutts Interviewed by Eric Enge on September 24, 2007



I hope this answers your questions.

[dartman]

Would it be safe to conclude that using nofollow on page links to contact, faq and similar
type pages should preserve PR for that particular page?

[Webnauts]

Originally Posted by dartman

Would it be safe to conclude that using nofollow on page links to contact, faq and similar
type pages should preserve PR for that particular page?

I guess here is your answer: Robot Meta NoFollow - SearchTools Index Test
and this Meta Robots NoFollow- Should Not Be Indexed - SearchTools Index Test

[dartman]

Originally Posted by dartman

Would it be safe to conclude that using nofollow on page links to contact, faq and similar
type pages should preserve PR for that particular page?

Originally Posted by Webnauts

I guess here is your answer...

Not exactly

More specifically - "individual outbound links with nofollow" to contact, faq, etc from the index page.
This should prevent PR from being passed to those pages?

[Webnauts]

Originally Posted by dartman

Not exactly

More specifically - "individual outbound links with nofollow" to contact, faq, etc from the index page.
This should prevent PR from being passed to those pages?

Those links will not pass PR to those pages.

[OLYMPOS]

Thank you very much for your responses. I am really very interested, what will happen in future.

The day before i have posted this thread, I got for a pagerank 4 website a link from pagerank 9 which has about 110 external links on it.

As i wrote, the header on this PR 9 site includes <meta name="ROBOTS" content="INDEX, NOFOLLOW" /> but the links are just normal links, even without target= "_blank"....

Grüsse auch nach Deutschland.

[Webnauts]

Originally Posted by OLYMPOS

Thank you very much for your responses. I am really very interested, what will happen in future.

The day before i have posted this thread, I got for a pagerank 4 website a link from pagerank 9 which has about 110 external links on it.

As i wrote, the header on this PR 9 site includes <meta name="ROBOTS" content="INDEX, NOFOLLOW" /> but the links are just normal links, even without target= "_blank"....

Grüsse auch nach Deutschland.

Then the links on those pages will not be followed, so you will not receive any PR juice.

Wo in Deutschland? Hier Augsburg.