Bucket with hole in it leaking water. Represents websites leaking PageRank

Google Webmaster Trends Analyst, Susan Moskwa informed us in the Q & A section of last weeks phone conference that even if a page is blocked by Robots.txt that it still can have PageRank passed to it from pages that are linking to it unless you use nofollow within the link.

Let’s say that you don’t care rather or not your Policy & Procedures page is indexed by Google or not so you decide to add the page to your Robots.txt file. This will effectively tell search engines that abide by the rules set fourth within Robots.txt to not index that particular page.

Let’s say that you have a footer link to your Policy & Procedures page as well as a link to this page immediately below your order form or other forms found through out your website. If these links are not property created with the nofollow tag then you are going to be passing PageRank to your Policy & Procedures page that doesn’t even have the privilege of being indexed by Google.

This goes to show us that taking the time to make sure something is done right is going to be far better then having to go back and fix things later. If your website is leaking PageRank then that can affect how well certain pages of your site performs within Google SERPs.

John Jones

- 10 minutes of SEO, SEM & Internet Marketing