Links page and Robots.txt

Hello,

I know that linking to some websites may hurt your google PR. I am trying to build PR and I am trading links with some sites. What happens if I add my links page to the Robots.txt file to tell bots not to crawl that page. Will this make it so my PR will never be affectred by linking to the wrong websites?

-Thanks!

<removed links>

Hi,
In theory your robots.txt file controls (more accurately denies) bot access to files on your server. In its blurb, google says they honor site robots files so denying the link page should keep things sweet.

As for exchanging links, I'm fairly sure that, as long as sites you link to/from are relevant (offering similar services or enhancing your offerings) then you would not be penalized, in fact you may improve your relevancy score somewhat.

Because we make our sites for visitors and not search engines we wouldn't want links to irrelevant or irresponsible sites anyway, as useless links will be far more damaging in terms of turning your users off your site -never to return or buy your services- than any likely impact on PR.

Thanks Hombre!

"Most" of my links on my links page are relevant however I did swap links with some free directories and search sites which may or may not look like a link farm. I dont want to piss off google for linking to a link farm so I am going to add the links page to my robots file as do not follow. Anyone else think I should have a problem doing this? Last thing I want is google's spider thinking I am tring to trick it...

How come a smart arse like you didn't know the answer?

I think that the google spider thinking that you're trying to trick it would be the last of your worries here.

Links for free directories, etc won't hurt you as long as they aren't spammy directories and these are easy to pick. What a lot of webmasters will see is that your links are basically removed from your site as far as the SE robots are concerned, so they'll be concerned that their links from you won't be counted, and won't link to you in the first place. There's a VERY thin line there... be very careful of what you do.

Would hiding the links page from the spiders not defeat the purpose of having it (from an SEO standpoint anyways)?

Actually no. From a purely SEO standpoint, hiding your links pages will help your site to not seem like anything spammy if there's already some grey areas in use on the site.

What you are really doing is robbing your linking partners or a deserved linek to their site, meaning that their sites will loose rankings and popularity, and in the end that'll affect your site because the site linking to you is weaker. If everyone did this, no one's sites would ever get found by spiders.

So from a SEO standpoint, it's not a bad idea but isn't worth doing unless you really need to hide a lot of things. From a network-building point of view, you'll just p*ss off the webmasters that are linking to you. And the last thing we need out here is bad feelings towards other fellow webmasters.

Yes, but assuming you're actually placing links on your site to benefit the users, then there isn't anything 'spammy' about it. Why then would you hide them?

Thanks for all the feedback I found the answers I needed. I agree with Catacaustic it would be unfair and would end up hurting everyone performance. I was just curious if that works. Thanks!

Unfortunately there's a lot of webmasters that are paranoid that linking to outside websites will somehow "leak" the PR from their site, and they'll end up with less. This can be true, but you need to have a seriously bad internal linking structure for that to be even a remote consideration.

As for the users, blocking robots by any of these methods won't affect anything that the users see at all, so they will never see the difference between a links page that's been blocked by the robots or is open for the robots to find.

Oh, and as a final point, there's really not that many sites out there that have a links section that is aimed purely at their users. Most webmasters use them to be able to exchange links and boost their own webistes popularity, and if a visitor looks at them, it's just a bonus for whoever they are linking to.