Will google still rank a site if blocked in Robots.txt

[mike2010]

This is a question for a client.

He's a reseller for GoDaddy..and has his own white label with GoDaddy Reseller . But GoDaddy Reseller recommends everybody to keep their sites as is.

Which means this happens to their white label in Robots.txt

Disallow: /

Their main homepage is listed in the google index. (i'm guessing crawled before the robots.txt was implemented)

So is it possible to still get his home page ranked decently high in the search if enough positive white-hat marketing tactics were used ? and has decent legit backlinks back to his site ?

[lucy24]

Is he trying to rank for the phrase "a description of this site is not available"?

[weiskopf]

Yes and yes.

I've done that with several sites, and it will still list the site - but just the root page (just the domain).
The snippet will say something like "a description of this site is not available b/c this site does not allow us to crawl it via its robots.txt"

But yes, the homepage will remain listed. Which sucks if you're trying to go low-key.

[mike2010]

interesting thx, weis.

and lol lucy. (soo sarcastic)

[drosan]

Their main homepage is listed in the google index. (i'm guessing crawled before the robots.txt was implemented)
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[edited by: goodroi at 1:27 pm (utc) on Feb 19, 2014]
[edit reason] Welcome to WebmasterWorld, now please go read & follow the community guidelines [/edit]

[bhartzer]

Google will rank a site, even number one, if they are disallowing all in robots.txt. I recently saw an example if this and wrote about it on my blog.

It has been a few months and the site it still there, ranking number one. I am pretty sure it has to do with links, and not the content on the site.

[lucy24]

My test site is 100% roboted-out, but it gets periodic human visitors from Bing search. They seem to value exact name matches more highly than google does. (I got curious and searched for the same phrase in google. I was nowhere. Well, at least not in the top 30.)

But you'd have to have some absolutely phenomenal links to outrank sites where your search phrase actually occurs on the page.

[mike2010]

They seem to value exact name matches more highly than google does. (I got curious and searched for the same phrase in google. I was nowhere. Well, at least not in the top 30.)

This is a new thing with Google lately, combined with all their recent trashy algorithm changes. It's really getting bad and they must be completely blind if they aren't recognizing the thousands of complaints from webmasters lately.

Matt Cutts must be hiding in a corner somewhere again.

It doesn't matter at all anymore to them..if you have an exact phrase...and these exact phrase keywords are ALL that are in your domain name and title tag, and <h1, h2 tags....and other parts of your site for that matter. Bing will correctly rank you within the top 5 most of the time. But Google's sending everybody's site out to the sea. Except if your from a huge company, news, or whatever. Amazon, Ebay, News sites.

Google used to be the 'peoples' search engine. Now it's the corporates search engine. They must of come to terms with an under-the-table agreement somewhere to help the economy by boosting key companies rankings.

[farhanawan]

and if you want that in search you will see some content in description please remove this tag from your page. "NOOPD, NOYDIR" and your site will show your content or will get description from dmoz or ydir.