Can I use a "no index, follow" command in a robot.txt file for a certain parameter on a domain?
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I have a site that produces thousands of pages via file uploads. These pages are then linked to by users for others to download what they have uploaded.
Naturally, the client has blocked the parameter which precedes these pages in an attempt to keep them from being indexed. What they did not consider, was they these pages are attracting hundreds of thousands of links that are not passing any authority to the main domain because they're being blocked in robots.txt
Can I allow google to follow, but NOT index these pages via a robots.txt file --- or would this have to be done on a page by page basis?
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Since you have those pages blocked via robots.txt, the bots would never even crawl these pages in theory...which means the Noindex,follow is not helping.
Also, if you do a report on the domain on opensiteexplorer and dig, you should be able to find tons of those links already showing up. So if my site is linking to a page on that site, that page may not be cached/indexed because of the robots.txt exclusion, but that as long as my site is follow, your domain is still getting the credit for the link.
Does that make sense ?
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Answered my own question.
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