Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
these directory pages come in handy for users here and there, but I don't want them indexed in Google because it's a huge number of pages.
Long story short, I have a couple of other situations that are irrelevant to this post, but basically, I want a small number of those directory pages to get indexed at some point in the future. Therefore, I have been using noindex instead of blocking the whole section off with robots.txt.
Since Google says that noindex still accumulate pagerank, that would mean they are keeping track of these pages in the background, even though they don't show them in the SERPs. My question is, would this affect my page count in Google? The last thing I want is for Google's algo to take into consideration my 200,000+ directory pages when they are doing their math(even though it doesn't show them in the index due to noindex).
Using noindex in the robots.txt file means the pages are not accessed at all, therefore links out from those pages will not be discovered. Only external links into that section of the site will pass PageRank in, but it will go no further within the site.
The last thing I want is for Google's algo to take into consideration my 200,000+ directory pages when they are doing their math.
To be sure of that, use a rel="nofollow" attribute on links that point to those urls.
