Hi There,

I have used a robots.txt file to stop all spiders indexing certain pages on my site (non-relevant content) and indeed there is no casched snapshot of my page on google. However after the last toolbar update these pages are now showing PR.

I assume this is because google find the links to the pages on my site and calculates the PR but i would have thought that would give a PR0 when it founf the 'noindex'.

I think that non relevant content on my site harms my rankings so how can i be sure that google isnt actually looking at these pages and taking them into account when ranking me?

G

all you are seeing is the TPR guesstimate based on the PR of the hostname.

Rankings are based on pages not sites so if every page on your site had a different subject it wouldn't matter in the slightest. The only thing that will happening is it will not help as much as relavent content would, but it certainly won't "harm".

Originally Posted by chrishirst

all you are seeing is the TPR guesstimate based on the PR of the hostname.

agree

what about if those pages have lots of external links to poker and gambling sites and perhaps a few adult websites and this is completely against the theme of my site?

out-going links affect the target page NOT the page they are on. Though off-topic links won't be doing your pages any good and if one of those sites gets penalised expect your site to be affected.

Yeah, thats pretty much what im worried about. I put a disallow line in robots.txt for all of those pages. Do you think that will be sufficient or should i scrap them completely?

It's simple. If you don't want bots of visitors to find the links, then they shouldn't be there.

Link for the right reasons and you are unlikely to go wrong.

I see what your saying Chris but i want the visitors to find them but not the bots. I need the content to be viewable to people hitting the site but they are in unrelated catergory to my targetted keywords so i dont want the search engines to see them. In my mind that will make the spider think that i have an extremely relevant site to my keywords. It does seem that the more keyword relevant pages i put on my site, the beter my main pages do.

I also see what your saying with google ranking individual pages but it seems to me that the pages my pages are linking to internally could effect rankings if google goes to that page and it is off-topic. Im in two minds, stick with these pages and the benefits they are giving me and try to block them with the robots.txt or remove them.

A more drastic solution would be to block the googlebots IP from viewing that page. But again could that effect me? It may see it as a broken link and i have seen evidence that this can harm google listings (along with badly formatted html tags).

I guess ill have to experiment a bit.

When you start trying or wanting to hide things from SE bots you are on a hiding to nothing.

It's quite simple, you are concerned about the SE weighing these link pages against you. If you are thinking like that then those pages are there for the wrong reasons. You should NOT allow the search engines to determine how you design and link your site!. If you are then you are not working with the site visitor in mind.
If you yourself have any qualms about the links they should NOT be there regardless of reciprocal arrangements etc. If you don't, leave them on the site but have them but display them as categorised pages/sections directory style. Good categorised outbound links can and do help by giving your pages hub or authority status for that topic. Provided they are not to banned or penalised site they do help, why do you think that directories often outrank other sites?
By your links pages gaining status the other pages in your site also benefit.