Hiding a link from Google

[Pegasus]

What's the easiest way of hiding a link from Google?

I have some links that I need to keep, but they are leaking pagerank at a high level.

Can anyone help with this? :)

[pendanticist]

Welcome to Webmaster World Pegasus,

What's the easiest way of hiding a link from Google?

I guess noindex, nofollow in the metatags of the file you don't want Google to see, might be a good place to start.

There are some inherent dangers (with respect to cloaking) listed in this post: [webmasterworld.com...]

Using the Site Search [searchengineworld.com] I came up with these:

[webmasterworld.com...]

[webmasterworld.com...]

[webmasterworld.com...]

Have a read...

Pendanticist.

[figment88]

Meta-tags "hide" all of the links on a page which may not be whats desired. Sometimes you want to have a robot follow some links and not others.

I think there are 3 main families of ways of selectively disallowing links to be followed:

1) JavaScript - either using an onClick event handler or placing it in the href. I've seen some recommendations to also use a JS function loacted from an external file located in a robot-exlcuded directory.

2) Make a link be a form submit that's action is to loads the new page. I beleive this method also invariably involves JavaSCript because it uses an onClick handler.

3) Point the link at a modified counter-type script located in a robot-excluded directory. Recent discussion has shown that Google does crawl some of these links if they are short, so to be safe you probably want to encode and decode the target URL.

For example,
<a href='/click/?url=encodedstring>Hi I'm a link</a>

Make /click/index.* some type of that decodes the string and changes the location t it

Place in robot file
User-Agent: *
Disallow: /click

[Waterloo]

We use JS which seems to work well.