Do excluded pages still count as links-in

[johnlod]

I have a robots.txt file on my business website and in this file I initially disallowed most of the other pages in an attempt to force people to be directed to my main page first.

However on nearly all of the pages on my website, there is a link back to my main page so as to help boost the google rankings of the main page.

My question is, are the links to index page contained in the dissallowed pages still counted as in-bound links.

Thanks in advance.

John

[encyclo]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld johnlod!

If the pages are excluded in robots.txt then the spider will not parse them - so consequently, the link to your home page will have no value as the spider does not know of its existence.

It is usually a bad strategy to favor just the home page of a site - you should see each page as a potential entry point to your site, optimizing for different keywords and phrases on different pages.

[johnlod]

When I took these pages out of the robots.txt file and also put a link on all of my other pages back to the index page, my Google PR jumped from 50-something to between 12 and 15.

Thanks for the info