Ok I have done a search for this and have not been able to find anything but was wondering if someone knows anything about this. I have sites which run on PHP and use includes for certian parts of the site. I am going to add a Cool Links section with the links being placed in a seperate file and will be displayed on the site using the include function. These links will not be exchanges just sites that I think are cool and want to offer links to for my visitors. But I don't want Google or any other search engine to see them. So my question is if I use my robots.txt file to dissallow that one file what will be the result....from my guessing their are 3 possible outcomes 1. Googlebot will not follow those links but will index and follow the rest of the page. 2. Googlebot will not index those links or any page that has that file included on it. 3. Googlebot will index the page down to the point where the included file appears in the source code but will not spider any futher down the page. I know I could use the rel nofollow tag but I dont want the added weight on the page as I am very careful about my text to code ratio. Any thoughts....
If you're worried about the ratio for SEO purposes, Vanessa Fox from Google stated a couple of weeks back that the ratio doesn't matter: http://videos.webpronews.com/2006/12/06/vanessa-fox-clarifies-the-role-of-google-sitemaps/