Hi guys, I've been told that its benfitial to not allow google to see your link exchange page... I've just wanted to check that this is a good things to do and if so what code do I need to stop google from spidering this page? Many Thanks, Devs.
If you don't want google to index it there are a few ways to do so. 1.) in your robots.txt page disallow the google bot from accessing that page Something like: User-agent: googlebot Disallow: /linkspage.htm You can also restrict Google's ability to index that page by placing the following in the meta tags: <META NAME="revisit-after" CONTENT="never"> <meta name="robots" content="noarchive"> <meta http-equiv="pragma" content="no-cache"> <META name="VIEWER-GOOGLE" content="NODISPLAY"> <META NAME="GOOGLEBOT" CONTENT="NOARCHIVE"> a bit extreme, but effective if that's what you're looking for.
Thats great thanks for the info - I trust that I would obviously have to remove the link from my uploaded sitemap.xml file? Would you say this is a good option to stop google from seeing a links page therefore they will only see incoming links... Thanks for the help.
Yes, you need to remove the blocked links in your sitemap, if you don't you'll recieve errors in Google Webmasters Central. After you add the disallow code to your robots.txt make sure to remove the URLs via Google Webmasters Central. Howerver, if this is a link exchange page that you trade links with don't expect people not to notice what your doing; you'll end up hurting yourself more than anything when people drop your links.
If you plan to do link exchanges, it would be stupid to block your link page from Google. You will get no one that wants to exchange with you because it easy to check to see if it is follow or no follow. You will end up not only losing the links from others, it will also make it look like you are dishonest and unethical. I recommend if you do not want Google to see the page, don't do link exchanges.