Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
In the last few days, my PageRank has dropped from 4 to 0, and I'm trying to see whether Google is penalizing me for something I've done.
One thing I might be guilty of is hidden links. I run a phpBB forum, and I hid my "memberslist.php" file from general visitors, and made this link visible only to registered members. Furthermore, I made it clear in my robots.txt file that memberslist.php should never be crawled:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /admin/
Disallow: /db/
Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /includes/
Disallow: /language/
Disallow: /templates/
Disallow: /common.php
Disallow: /config.php
Disallow: /faq.php
Disallow: /groupcp.php
Disallow: /login.php
Disallow: /memberlist.php
Disallow: /modcp.php
Disallow: /posting.php
Disallow: /privmsg.php
Disallow: /profile.php
Disallow: /search.php
Disallow: /viewonline.php
Disallow: /rss.php
My question: will Google penalize me for this hidden link, even if I made clear in my robots.txt file not to crawl this link?
Thanks very much!
In the last few days, my PageRank has dropped from 4 to 0, and I'm trying to see whether Google is penalizing me for something I've done.
eager2learnSEO - A TBPR (Toolbar PageRank) drop is being widely reported, so you are not alone.
PR drops to Zero for some long established sites
[webmasterworld.com...]
As Google's Adam Lasnick mentions in msg#:3324184, TBPR "isn't the way we communicate that your site is violating our guidelines."
Re hiding your links, the question about whether Google would take offense at a hidden link to a blocked page is an interesting one.
A question I'd ask about your setup is what mechanism you're using to make the link visible to registered members and invisible to others. Ask yourself what Googlebot would see.
If you block a page with robots.txt, Google may still index a link to the page, but it won't crawl the page itself... Look at this thread for a discussion on that...
[webmasterworld.com...]
Thanks very much for your response. I really appreciate it.
