Matt Cutts is in charge of the Webspam team at Google. His Blog is extremely popular in the webmaster and search engine optimization world. In many of his Blog posts and interviews there are always interesting tidbits of information that are revealed that only someone that worked for Google would know. Any insight into the secretive intricacies of Google’s algorithm is always great information and Matt Cutts is everyones primary source.

Matt Cutts was recently interviewed in California. During this interview he was asked about Robot.txt and Page Rank for pages that aren’t allowed to be crawled by Google. What was interesting in the interview was when he mentioned “you might want to have a master Sitemap page and for whatever reason NoIndex that, but then have links to all your sub Sitemaps.” A page that isn’t indexed within Google because of a Robot.txt file or NoFollow tag still carries Page Rank and outbound links on that page will still carry weight in internal and external cross-linking. Another situation he mentioned that was important for this scenario is if your website had multiple pages of similar or duplicate content, you could NoIndex the pages you don’t want Google to index but the links going into and coming out of those pages will still carry Page Rank.

The important thing to consider here is that the pages on your website create a web of Page Rank. The home page of your website passes link juice throughout your website. The path of your internal pages from the home page is extremely important from an SEO perspective. You want to make sure that your most important pages get the most link juice that can be obtained. There is always an optimal way to cross link your website and the above information may change some of the intricacies involved in choosing the optimal cross linking structure.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 15th, 2007 at 4:44 pmand is filed under Search Engine Marketing(t) . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.