I am creating a page that will have several links on it. I was wondering if there was a way to set it so that the search engines won't follow some of the links but will follow others. I am selling ad space on the page and the buyers want to earn pagerank from the link. the other links i don't want to be seen as reciprocal links. the thing is the links that i do not want followed way outnumber the number i want followed. Is it possible to use the robots.txt and block following except for certain links? any help would be appreciated
You could always send the links you don't want followed through a script that the spiders won't follow. Owlcroft has something like that called "Via".
You could use <a ... rel="nofollow"> you can not block outgoing links in your robots.txt. Or you could make your other links java script links.
i sometimes use a form such as [COLOR=#008000]<form name="myform" action="http://www.domain.com/somepage.html">[/COLOR] [COLOR=green]<a href="javascript:document.myform.submit()">Click here</a>[/COLOR] Code (markup): or use [COLOR=#008000]<a href="http://www.domain.com/somepage.html" rel="nofollow">link text</a>[/COLOR] Code (markup):
well i was hoping that there was something that i could do so i did not have to add "nofollow" to 500 links
It has been my understanding that links using "nofollow" are still spidered however they do not pass PR. Can someone confirm this?
I don't think Google has told us. Why don't you just exclude the page from the SERPs using robots.txt? Or just add nofollow to the entire page in robots.txt (you won't pass PR back to your mainpage that way, but ah well, with 500 links, it won't be worth anything anyway).
You said there was only a handful you didn't want nofollow tags on - just find and replace the lot with nofollow tags, then take the handful of nofollows off by hand.
my limited tests of rel="nofollow revealed this: msn does not spider these links yahoo does spider these links google the announcer of this tag theoretically should not be spidering this link.