Safe to link to sites and use robots.txt to block?

[BryantStevens]

I sometimes link exchange links to lower rated sites than my own for the sake of a link exchange. They don't bring in much traffic, but small pages can grow and any traffic helps. Obviously I don't want my own page rank to be lowered. So what I have done was block my links page from being spidered with a robots.txt file. That way Google (hopefullY) does not know about the page. Indeed, I have checked and Google does not cache a copy of the page. It knows about it, but it is not cached.

My two questions are:

1. Is this a good/safe strategy to avoid pagerank decline on my page and linking to someone who "may" be a bad page? I don't think they are, but they all have low incoming links and low PR. Like PR 1 and 2.

2. Is this ethical? Does any reciprocal link by nature "have" to be on a page that is able to be spidered by search engines?

Your opinions are commentary (good or bad) are welcome.

Thanks.

[edited by: BryantStevens at 9:53 pm (utc) on April 6, 2003]

[mbennie]

Outgoing links do not decrease page rank. A percentage of page rank is transferred to the page that gets the link but the amount that is transferred is not deducted from the page.

There is also some evidence that suggests sites with outbound links get a page rank boost.

On top of it all, who would offer any reciprocal link to you once they discover that your links page is excluded from being spidered?

Sounts like a bad idea to me.

[BryantStevens]

Right. I understand that part. But I've read on many occassions that a site can be penalized for linking to another site that Google deems as "bad." Especially doing a link exchange with them.

This is my insurance policy against doing that.

My question is, how you do you know if you are linking to someone who is "bad" and does this stragety work to prevent that?

[jdMorgan]

BryantStevens,

1) Know who you link to. Either they adhere to Google's rules for good pages, or they don't.

2) Depends on whether the webmasters of those sites are savvy enough to know about PR. If not, then they'll consider you to be a reciprocal partner, even though they get no PR benefit from your pages. If they do know about PR, they'll wait until their PR can benefit you, and then PR-block their link to you. That's fair, though, right?

Link for your visitor's benefit. Link naturally, not with PR blocks, and not for your benefit or another site's benefit. It's the visitor's good you should keep in mind. This is how Google looks at things, and this is how they will judge your site should they review it because of a spam complaint. So, be careful. The more successful you are, the more careful you must be, because your competitors will be looking for anything they can use against you to kick you out of their way up the SERPs.

My 2 cents,
Jim

[GrinninGordon]

mbennie

"Outgoing links do not decrease page rank. A percentage of page rank is transferred to the page that gets the link but the amount that is transferred is not deducted from the page."

That is not correct. That may have been correct once, but not now. At one time putting a URL search string to the whitehouse (quite funny some were, searching the whitehouse for Viagra ;-)) would have got you ranked high.

I think now, it is a balance. Putting outbound links on pages reduce the PR of the page, but may well increase the relevancy / portal points beyond what you lose.

I had the same fear, but have decided to start outbound linking to any of the sites referenced (truly) on one of my sites, in return for a link back (sorry, but scratching backs and all). The rest go through a cgi encoded URL that hides the destination URL (and where the cgibin benefits from a deny in the robots text file).