indyank - 6:07 am on Jun 5, 2011 (gmt 0)

I have a confusion here as I think people are using some words differently than I usually do.

What do you all mean by blocking? Do you consider specifying a "noindex" meta tag for googlebot as blocking it?

When I use the word "block" or "blocking" I always consider it as something that one does through robots.txt. I have a feeling that adding a noindex meta tag doesn't necessarily mean you are blocking googlebot for the following reasons.

1)Googlebot still follows links in the content unless you add "nofollow" as well to the robots meta tag.
2) Recently google have clarified that you can add a noindex meta tag to pages that you intend to improve, so they could still keep track of history of such pages.This clearly suggests that they do keep them somewhere in some form, though they don't show them in the results, even as stubs (only urls).

netmeg, do you add "noindex" meta tag to the example pages you had mentioned above or do you add a "noindex, nofollow" meta tag or do you block them via robots.txt?

Update: Though google is using the word block in the title for the help page linked above, they are obviously contradicting themselves when they asked people to use noindex meta tag on pages that people want to improve, so they could have a history.

[edited by: indyank at 6:39 am (utc) on Jun 5, 2011]