Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
If I have say 30 links on page A all linking to page B which has meta robots set as content="none", what happens to PR in this case? Does page A retain the PR it might have passed on if the content="none" weren't there? Do these links still count as "votes" for page B?
Help!
You state "Does page A retain the PR it might have passed on if the content="none" weren't there?" Page A loses no PR from linking out to other pages, whether they are indexed or not.
I don't think "none" is a valid value for the robots meta tag
I'm pretty sure it is. I've used it before. It's equivalent to "noindex,nofollow". See here: [robotstxt.org...]
Page A loses no PR from linking out to other pages, whether they are indexed or not.
Ok, I never really got to grips with this concept. So please give me an example situation where a page DOES lose PR.
Does page A retain the PR it might have passed on if the content="none" weren't there? Do these links still count as "votes" for page B?
Page A retains PR because outgoing links can only send PR to other pages, but they do not dilute the PR at the originating page. It is the basic principle of PR distribution: "A page can never lose PR by outgoing links, it can only increase PR of the pages linked to."
Pages with "noindex,nofollow" will receive PR, although you will not find them in the index. You could see this if you use the Google toolbar or some PageRank checking utility. In your configuration the sad thing is that PR of the B-type pages gets lost because of the nofollow. Better is to use "noindex,follow" and have a link back to page A. In that case the vote from A going to B will come back partially at page A. This will increase the PageRank of A.
From a PageRank point of view, always avoid pages with the "nofollow" meta tag or pages without outgoing links because the PageRank voting capability of such a page is wasted. One link for example to your homepage is enough to reuse the voting capability of a page.
