Bot Herding: The Ultimate Tool for PageRank Sculpting

[Webnauts]

I would appreciate your thoughts: Bot Herding: The Ultimate Tool for PageRank Sculpting

I am sure by implementing the above techniques, you can achieve the maximum possible control over the PageRank flow within your web site. How about you?

[The Leader]

Sounds to complicated to me!
It'll be quicker for me to build links instead.

[bobitza]

Good stuff John, thanks for sharing.

I sort of disagree on the use of nofollow ... perhaps because I am already sculpting PR with nofollows, hehe. No, seriously, if I no follow my TOS page I don't think someone will be stupid enough to bother linking to that.

The noindex directive for robots.txt is new to me so again, thanks for sharing.

[Webnauts]

I think you both must re-read the article. I say so, because if you really understood it, you would have posted something entirely different.

[earnest]

Thanks for the idea.

Feel free to call me a total noob, but the fact that pagerank was assigned to non-indexed pages was breaking news for me. Hence the question: what about internal links?

[bobitza]

I think you both must re-read the article. I say so, because if you really understood it, you would have posted something entirely different.

OK, let me take another shoot at it

So, you say ...

Page A is linking to page B, and that link is attributed nofollow status. In this case Page A will not pass PageRank to Page B, right? But what is if page B is linked from another page of your web site or from an external web site without that link being protected with the nofollow attribute? Won’t PageRank be assigned to page B? Won’t a snippet show up in the search results? It will! Is that what you want? Wouldn’t you prefer to make sure that the incoming PageRank for page B is being passed to the most important web pages of your web site?

Of course I want the incoming PR to be assigned to most important web pages; and I will never (to stick to my previous example with the TOS page) create linking campaigns to my TOS page.

In the scenario that you described, if someone links to my B page (aka TOS page), this is something that I can not control. Because on my part I nofollowed all the internal links, the PR that is assigned to page B is coming ONLY from other websites, right? Yeah, I know, crazy people do crazy things (like linking to your TOS page without asking).

If I have outgoing internal or external links on Page B that will benefit from the little PR of the page, that's even better!

You also say ...

if Page B is linked from an external site without being protected by the nofollow attribute, PageRank will still be assigned to it, and it can still show up in the search results.

... and that's bad because ... ? I mean, if I focus my seo and linking efforts to page A, I don't think page B will be in the top 100 results of anything important.

[abbyink]

Does anyone know if the NoIndex directive for robots files is slated to become a standard for bots?

[Webnauts]

Does anyone know if the NoIndex directive for robots files is slated to become a standard for bots?

Google supports the robots.txt noindex directive. All other engines not.

[SteveGerencser]

Ok, I read that post a few times and think that the basic take away from it is this -

You have a page (A) with a noindex on it to keep Google from indexing the page..

Page (A) links out to page (B)

Now we have a third page (C) and it links to page (A).. But, since page (A) is noindexed you are saying that the pagerank that would have been passed from (C) to (A) is now passed from (C) to (B), skipping over (A)..

Is this pretty much what you are saying in that blog post??

[bobitza]

Now I'm really confused ...

John, you might wanna re-phrase that post.