Effect of noindex/follow on Google PR?

[Janet]

I have found in the past that my sitemap pages show up in the SERPs (because there is lots of keyword rich anchor text)and would like to stop them being indexed. If I place a noindex/follow on the sitemap page, what is the effect on the PR of the pages that the sitemap links to?

Although I would like to stop the sitemap being in the SERPs, I do want to retain the PR to the linked pages and also the value of the anchor text on the site map page. Any thoughts?

TIA

Janet

[WebGuerrilla]

If the page is not indexed, It has no PR. If it has no PR, it can't pass any PR to the pages it links to.

[stevenha]

Or, to paraphrase what WebGuerrilla said, Using noindex or nofollow on a sitemap page, is not a good idea.

[Janet]

I would never want to use NOFOLLOW! Just the NOINDEX. But I get the message.

thanks

[Pricey]

hmm I put noindex over several sets of internal links on several of my pages, as Google was showing them is search results, when I wanted parts of the page content to be shown in results, so it was showing :

PAGE TITLE
link ¦ link ¦ link ¦ link

insted of

PAGE TITLE
Relevent Page Content

I got it to work, but I think this may have lost me PR :/

[Receptional Andy]

>>as Google was showing them is search results, when I wanted parts of the page content to be shown in results, so it was showing :

Surely you have now removed some useful pages from your site from Google, for the sake of changing the snippet of text?

Also remember that the snippet google displays is entirely dependent on the search term, and so visitors would not have been seeing the same as you anyway. I'd get rid of the noindex if I were you...

[Pricey]

Yes, but I don't want visitors seeing my site as a link farm before they even click on the link :/

[Receptional Andy]

>>Yes, but I don't want visitors seeing my site as a link farm before they even click on the link :/

If you search for a term your visitors look for, the snippet used in the serps will be different, because Google highlights the occurance of the search term on your page, so unless you try all the searches that people use to find your site, you won't know exactly what it looks like.

Even if your snippet is always terrible, I don't see how this justifies the noindexing of other pages - many people don't really read the descriptions anyway.

One final thing -

PAGE TITLE
link ¦ link ¦ link ¦ link

If it's the links you have excluded with robots, then this content is still on the page anyway! The reason your snippet has changed cannot be because of the robots exclusion.