i know by asking this question it would look like i would use it for personal gain but im not. what i want on my site is a page where i can put all the links i need and will use but with out giveing them an actual link recognised by google (as most would be my competitors) if i put this page in a password protected folder would google still find them? if not how do i hide these links, otherwise ill stick with my excell spreadsheet which sucks
You need to explain more what you want. You want peoples to see a list of links and be able to click them? Or only see them? Or not see them, only you? I know you can tell Google not to follow links if they go to your competitors with the rel="nofollow" or a robots.txt. It will notice and cache that there ARE links but won't follow them.
well its just for me, but im not bothered if others do see them., so if i make them all nofollow in the code then it will give them no backlinks? ty in advance
I'm not sure if they will count as backlinks. This is something Dan Schulz should be asked, he knows this stuff pretty well. Any reason then why you would like links to competitors? I can understand the not giving them backlinks thing. Otherwise, why don't you just have the links bookmarked in your browser? I'm not sure what you're using the links for, so if they don't need to be on the site at all, that's even better, ja? As a side note, since it sounds like you don't know... things like cloaking and hiding usually goes the other way around-- the robots see them and the (non-blind) humans don't. Both can get you banned from Google. I don't think either are the solution for you. Remember that robots can see anything that's pure text or HTML. They don't see Javascript or Flash or images (at least, SE bots don't, some spam bots do). You could have the links as images, so you can see them (and any other sighted human) while they are not clickable for anyone, including robots.
im assuming the blind ones cant see them also lmao the reason i want them is to keep an eye on what they are doing and what new news they have i want to list all my competitors for refference.. i could bookmark but i work from different computers and with different people. thanks for the advice i think i will just use my home computer for the research and bookmark there.
If they have an RSS feed, subscribe. That can keep you up to date on new things. RSS checks for anything new. If not, use a web-based bookmarker like de.li.cio.us (did I spell that right?) The blind folks use something called a screen reader which uses a normal browser to browse the webs... screen readers, like SE bots, see all the text. So, hiding a link using colour for instance, would not be seen by sighted visitors but would be seen by robots and read out loud to the blind. That's why I kept saying "sighted" viewers. Good luck.
You can make sure the links don't count for google by adding the following meta-tag to the page: <meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow"> That way google doesn't index the page (which is what you want, as you only want to use it yourself, not your visitors) nor will it follow the links on the page. If you do want google to find the page and index it, but not have the links followed by google you can use: <meta name="robots" content="index,nofollow"> You could also put rel="nofollow" in each link, but that's usually more work.
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="index, nofollow"> You can use this code if you dont want SE crawlers to access any perticular page or define it in robots.txt file.