Outbound Links Page

Is there a reason for adding a INDEX,NOFOLLOW tag?

[negril]

With regards to my outbound links page, I would like to know what results (Good or Bad) could I expect if I added the following tag before launching the page?

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="INDEX,NOFOLLOW">

[Slade]

Any robots that obeyed the tag would read the page, but not follow any links on the page. The content of the page would be studied(as usual), but you wouldn't pass on any PR.

I don't know if this would protect you from bad neighborhood outbound linking, but it would piss me off if I was swapping links with you.

[keyplyr]

I used that same tag for a while before I knew much about Google's link relavancy. I even used external JavaScript to writeln the links so I could hoard my precious PR.

It's now my opinion that the linking of similiar themed websites endorses authoritive status and I want to help Google find these sites that link to me.

[fathom]

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="INDEX,NOFOLLOW"> I see no reasoning to use this on a links page. Although you may believe that you are keeping PageRank inside your site is a plus you are also losing the potential of Googlebot finding other links pointing to you that Google currently does not have indexed.

e.g. if you are linking to same theme sites, they are likely linking to other same theme sites, so on. Which means the chances are somewhere down the same theme tree Googlebot will find other pages and sites that are linking to you.

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX,FOLLOW"> might be a better alternative.

Of all the web pages you could have on your web site, a links page is probably the one most likely not a good introduction to your web site.

I personally believe that you get no real gain from either method.

[edited by: fathom at 10:52 am (utc) on Dec. 1, 2002]

[martinibuster]

Not a nice thing to do. Anybody saavy enough about pr checks for these things, including robots.txt.

I do, and I've noticed other people doing it to my site as well.