Hello,
I have a bit of a problem here - been searching the web for days and finding conflicting information regarding how passing of pagerank works for pages disabled in robots.txt.
Perhaps you could enlighten me as to which of the following is true:
1) Pages disabled by robots.txt file can
accrue pagerank, but
do NOT pass pagerank to other pages linked from them.
2) There's not much difference between a page with a noindex metatag, and a page disabled in robots.txt - both of them will
accrue pagerank AND pass it on further to other pages.
I've read various opinions online, and some seem to think it's the first case, others the second. At the very least, I know that pages disabled by robots.txt can accrue pagerank, because I've found an old interview with Matt Cutts where he said the following:
Now, robots.txt says you are not allowed to crawl a page, and Google therefore does not crawl pages that are forbidden in robots.txt. However, they can accrue PageRank, and they can be returned in our search results.
Whether it can pass pagerank or not is still a question (because as far as I understand, googlebot can't crawl the page, so it won't know what links are on it).
What are your thoughts on this?
