Is Link equity / Link Juice lost to a blocked URL in the same way that it is lost to nofollow link

[Andrew-SEO]

Hi

If there is a link on a page that goes to a URL that is blocked in robots txt - is the link juice lost in the same way as when you add nofollow to a link on a page.

Any help would be most appreciated.

[NickSamuel]

Hi Andrew,

That's a pretty interesting question and quite difficult to definitely answer (hence a lack of replies I'd guess.)

Just to clarify, which rule in the robots.txt are you referring to; Disallow: / or Noindex: /?

So if the page is disallowed from crawling then my best guess is it would have the same impact as a link being no-followed i.e you are saying to GoogleBot please don't crawl or count this page...you're not vouching for it and perhaps don't want it to be indexed.

If you are saying you are linking to a page which has a

Lastly, specifically with regards to Link Juice, you might find this old post from Matt Cutts interesting: https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/pagerank-sculpting/

It was written in 2009 about the idea of "PageRank Sculpting" or Link-juice funelling. The official line from Matt back then was that it wasn't really a thing, and as he says, Google will have got a lot smarter about assessing the value of internal/external links 10 years on whether they have a nofollow property or not.

He also advises that you don't worry about it and in his own imitable way, focus more on creating great content

Belated happy new year, and I hope this sort of helps!

Nick