buddhu - 9:21 am on Jul 27, 2012 (gmt 0)

Yeah, Graeme, that's about the size of it.

I was prepared to take the loss of pagerank by blocking the landing page (preferable to a penalty!). The issue was that I had got it into my head that I wanted to take the traffic off that page and onto a page that was not blocked so I'd get the benefit of any genuine links that might result from that traffic; obviously having them link to a robots.txt-blocked page would be of no ranking benefit.

There was no sneaky intent, but it was a clumsy idea and, as tedster points out, it is a kind of cloaking.