How Robots.txt May Allow Link Sellers A Loophole

Published: February 19, 2008, 1:47 pm

Tags: link selling, robots, google, paid links, robots txt

I’ve got to hand it to Andy Beard. Here’s a creative way of getting around Google’s paid link policy. The search engine has effectively told webmasters that they will be penalized for selling links. Many webmasters have gone to instituting nofollow attributes on their paid links so that they aren’t penalized. That penalizes the webmasters buying the links as they don’t get any PR transference from those nofollow links. So will Beard’s Robots.txt solution solve his problem? It’s possible, but not likely. Robots.txt will allow webmasters the ability to tell Google not to crawl their pages. If you have a page on which you link to other sites that have paid for you to do so then you can prevent Google from crawling that web page altogether. The page will still be indexed, but it won’t be crawled. And the natural follow up question is, “Well, if it isn’t crawled then how will be indexed?” If there is even one inbound link to

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