PR and noindex, follow and nofollow

What happens to PR with meta "nofollow"?

[roodle]

A,B,C and D are new pages on a site, but only A has incoming links from various currently indexed pages in the site. If pages A,B,C and D all interlink, but B,C and D all have meta robots "noindex,follow", how does this affect PR for the new pages? Will B,C and D still gain some PR, even though they're not indexed?

I've read explanations from several different forums about the way Google handles this type of thing, and I've also read this: [webmasterworld.com...] but there are conflicting ideas.

Perhaps my real question is, what's the difference between the above situation, and when B,C and D all have meta robots "noindex,nofollow"? Do A's "votes" for B,C and D kind of, disappear? Or does Google ignore any votes for "nothing"?

Any help will be appreciated.

Happy Halloween.

[Jon_King]

Any page I have with "noindex,nofollow" has 0PR no matter what links to it.

[BigDave]

Every page that has an incoming link that google knows about will get PR. Even if that page does not exist, but is just an URL in a link, that URL will get PR.

Noindex means that the PR is useless except to pass on. "follow" means that those pages can pass on their PR even if they are not in the index, as well as counting for things like anchor text.

[piskie]

I agree with BigDave exactly.

[Jon_King]

So a page that has never been spidered by Google and is not in the index (hence "noindex,nofollow") will pass on PR to the links on the page that Google has never seen?

[Jon_King]

Or if I add incomming links to a "noindex,nofollow" page you say it will get PR?

[BigDave]

If you read the original post correctly, it was noindex,follow.

And google has to read the page to find out that it is noindex,nofollow.

If it is nofollow, they will not follow the links from that page, and they will not assign PR from those links. Actually, I don't *know* that PR will not be assigne if it is nofollow, but they will not add the links on that page to their list of links to follow.

Noindex simply means that they will not serve it up as a result. You can assume that it is handled the same as all other pages in every other way.

[Jon_King]

Oops sorry about that BigDave. It's the wine and quick posts inbetween Tricker Treaters...

[tantalus]

I have a related question.

Will the noindex result in a URL Only listing?

[roodle]

Hi, thanks for all your replies.

Ok, after this little pretext, the reason I'd like to know about this issue is that I'm about to update a site with some new pages. I've read a few horror stories about people adding a large percentage (wrt current site size) of new pages and then seeing their pages crash out of the serps. So, my plan is to add them in small quantities, using the "noindex,nofollow" in order to "hide" the others from Google until I'm ready to add them. But at the same time I'm concerned about PR, hence my question about the effects of the meta robots tag on PR.

So, from what I've gleaned from your replies, the only way to "hide" pages from G is to use "noindex,nofollow" (since using "noindex,follow" G will treat the page like any other except it won't be offered as a search result). But, there's still a question mark over what happens to PR in this case. If page A has a PR of 1 (for argument's sake) and it links out to B,C, and D, all of which are set to "noindex,nofollow", does A retain its PR of 1?

Would setting the robots text to "disallow" B,C and D have an identical effect?

Tantalus - I have pages set to robots content="none" and they do have URL only listing in G.

[BigDave]

Will the noindex result in a URL Only listing?

It should result in being totally removed, and never showing up in any way.

On the other hand, if you block a file from getting crawled with your robots.txt, you can end up with an URL only listing.

The difference is that one is "do not index this file" and the other is "do not crawl this file".

You have to allow the file to be crawled to inform the bot not to index.