Do you get credit for an external link that points to a page that's being blocked by robots.txt

[DaveSottimano]

Hi folks,

No one, including me seems to actually know what happens!?

To repeat:

If site A links to /home.html on site B and site B blocks /home.html in Robots.txt, does site B get credit for that link?

Does the link pass PageRank? Will Google still crawl through it? Does the domain get some juice, but not the page?

I know there's other ways of doing this properly, but it is interesting no?

[ShaMenz]

Hi Dave,

I believe there would be two answers to your question

1.  If Googlebot finds the page via the external link, then YES:

• the link will pass PageRank
• Googlebot will crawl
• both the page and the domain will get juice, because Googlebot hasn't seen the robots.txt

2.  If Googlebot comes to the site via the root (assuming that it obeys the command to block), then NO:

• None of the above would happen because the page would never be seen by Googlebot, so the incoming link would never be seen.

If, on the other hand, Googlebot comes to the page via the root and ignores the command to block, then it should be reasonable to assume that means the page would be crawled & links attributed as though there were no robots.txt, but that is only an assumption, so I guess your question would remain open.

Don't suppose that helped much

Sha