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lucy24 - 6:07 am on Sep 21, 2012 (gmt 0)
robots.txt will not prevent the page from being indexed. It will only prevent it from being crawled-- which means that if you've made any changes for the better, g can't see them. What you need to do is
#1 set up the redirect
#2 go into gwt and delete the page from the current cache and index. Next time g### tries to crawl the page, it will meet the 301 and it will carry on from there.
That's assuming for the sake of discussion that the redirect approach is the right way to go. Don't look at me; I don't speak SEO.
Putting a meta noindex on the old page won't do any harm-- but won't do any good either, if the redirect is starting right now. And "nofollow" is obviously pointless on your front page-- it would only prevent google from following links away from the page into the rest of your site, which is exactly what you don't want!
bing wmt has a function for "I disown this link categorically and decline to have anything to do with it" but I don't think g### does yet. Unless I blinked and missed something.
You can put up referer blocks in htaccess if there are humans that you don't want physically coming to your site from Those Other Sites. But I kinda doubt this is your problem ;) Otherwise it's a waste of time, because it has no effect on robots. Google doesn't follow links; it makes a shopping list and comes back later. And even if it changed its crawling technique and did meet a referer block, it wouldn't know that that's why it is getting blocked. (A 403 is like calling someone on the phone and getting no answer. You have no way of knowing whether they're really not home, or they've turned off the ringer, or the rats have been chewing on the phone cord, or maybe they glanced at Caller ID and said I don't feel like talking to him right now.)