Inbound link and norobots question

[kmayer]

I have a few dynamic photo galleries that run on our domain name. It is at example.com/galleryname/gallery.aspx . These galleries have nothing to do with our business (or keywords), and are just personal photo galleries for me and a few of my friends. Should I add these to the no robots file or does it not really make a difference? There are several website that link to these galleries. Does that have a positive effect, negative effect, or no effect? The websites that are linking to these galleries are unrelated to our keywords or business.

[edited by: tedster at 9:31 pm (utc) on May 19, 2010]
[edit reason] switch to example.com [/edit]

[FranticFish]

If you don't want these pages to be indexed because they won't bring any referrals (or at least nothing you're interested in) but want to utilise the benefit of links pointing at them for the rest of the site then make them 'noindex,follow' - not in robots.txt but in the actual pages themselves.

[kmayer]

Thanks for the input. Sounds like a good suggestion. The only reason I was thinking I would not want the galleries indexed is becuase I feared that they might dilute my real keywords. Is that correct thinking? The galleries do have captions so there is some text there.

[tedster]

I don't think there's much risk there unless, maybe, you started to get lots of backlinks to the photo gallery for some reason. And if you use noindex,follow for that directory, you should be fine.

[FranticFish]

As far as I know, having some 'off-topic' content in a site will not hurt the rankings of the 'on-topic' pages, but as I don't run or manage large sites that cover multiple topics I haven't studied whether it does or doesn't and couldn't say 100%.

My guess is it doesn't (Wikipedia for example ranks for everything but every article is off-topic to hundreds of thousands of others). Anyone else got experience in this?

[aristotle]

You should probably make sure that there are no internal links between the on-topic and off-topic pages. Although such links would pass PR, they might confuse the Google algo as to what the on-topic is.

[kmayer]

Thanks Guys for your help. Sounds like noindex, no follow on the page is the way to go.

[rowtc2]

In this case posting images from another topic will not help you to bring more traffic.

I would not risk because i don't see any benefit and i would block them from indexing.