Google is one of the first companies to introduce the concept of pay per click service and through the AdSense program you just need to simply create a free account with them as a publisher and stop displaying advertisements on your website or blog. Every time one of those advertisements on your website gets clicked by real users, you make some money and when you have $100 in your account, Google sends you a check. Now, this might not be as simple as snow; everyday a handful of Internet publishers lose their AdSense accounts for seemingly “no reason at all” and all the hard work done by them goes in vain. If Google suspects some unscrupulous activity in your AdSense account, you would be sent a notice by them and your account will be terminated forever. The following are a couple of possible reasons for AdSense account termination:

• Clicking on your own advertisements: In the eyes of Google this is nothing more than click fraud. It happens sometimes by mistake, but this cannot be at way of life for a AdSense publisher! So, if you have accidentally clicked on your advertisements, it is a good idea to let Google know about it and also make sure that such things don’t happen in the future. However, you should never ever try to fool Google by clicking on your advertisements from different IP addresses or hire people to do so.
• Not following the AdSense terms and conditions: Yes, just like any other service on the Internet, AdSense also has a “terms of service” and you need to follow it completely if you don’t want your AdSense account getting tossed.
• Not complying with Google AdSense program policies: There is a separate page on Google that talks elaborately about the kind of websites that are acceptable for AdSense programs and also what steps you need to take from your site to keep your account live and going; it is a good idea to read this page completely and act accordingly.
• Having multiple AdSense accounts: This might actually sound sumptuous, but it is not really a very good idea. Google has very advanced algorithms and these are capable of identifying all the tricks that he might have up your sleeves to fool them – so, never ever think of trying to fool Google.
• You shouldn’t ignore the warnings from Google: If the big “G” wants to know something from you, it is a good idea to be responsive and not let the questions or notice escalate to the heights of an account termination.

• By selling advertising space: This is one of the easiest methods of making money online through a high-traffic website or blog. You just need to let advertisers bid for an advertising space on your blog and you can choose the offer that suits you the best. However, this is going to work well only if your website or blog has a high amount of traffic and if you don’t have that you need to channel your efforts towards increasing traffic.
• Adbrite – This is a very popular advertising network and allows you to become a publisher for the different kinds of advertisements that they have. They have a wide variety of different advertisements such as text advertisements, in-line advertisements and full-page advertisements.
• Chitika- This is actually pretty similar to AdSense, but this is only restricted to the United States and if you are not a resident of the US, you might not be granted a membership.
• Kontera – This has become very popular over the last couple of years and they offer in-line advertisements that remain highlighted and display a small message when hovered over. These are especially useful for “hubbers”.
• Bidvertiser – if you have not been able to sell off some advertising space on your website or blog, this might be a good option for you; through Bidvertiser, you can display advertisements from the highest bidder and vice versa. The payout level however is a bit low at just $10.
• CBprosense – This is actually a different ballgame altogether. This is a bit similar to AdSense but allows you to earn some real big money through affiliate marketing. CBprosense would actually have your Clickbank code embedded inside it and would display advertisements related to the content on a page (and those are not mere CPC advertisements but affiliate advertisements that can earn you huge commissions).

There are a lot of other options that can be considered as a substitute for AdSense, but there was one thing that you need to keep in mind if you want to make money online is that the search engines are not looking for you – they are looking for the most relevant content and you need to make sure that you outrun your competitors as far as search engine listings are concerned.

What is a bounce rate?

Bounce rate is actually the percentage of visitors to your website that leaves the page directly without clicking through any other page on the website.

Now here are a few reasons for a website’s high bounce rate,

Internal Factors:

a. Web Design and Usability
Keep in mind that presentation is quite important. If you don’t have a good web design or has design flaws that make it uncomfortable for visitors, they will more likely just close your webpage off. Provide a simple and nice design for your site with good content so that your visitors will stay

b. Website Content
You should also make sure that your website contains important and useable information for your visitors. If you have good web content and the interface easy, you will surely have loyal visitors who will visit your site often.

c. Navigation
If you wish for your website visitors to stay and click through your pages make sure that navigation of your website is easy and clear. Don’t leave your visitors guessing as to where they’re supposed to go next.

d. Technical Issues
There are times when some php code shows up rather than the content, make sure that you check your website for loading times and correctness of all your scripts. Visitors tend to get discouraged when they see that not all the scripts of the website is working and as such you get a high bounce rate.

Marketing Factors

a. Poor Keyword Selection
Keyword marketing is a marketing strategy where website can get a lot of traffic from. If you choose a non-related keyword to your site, then you just get a lot of visitors looking for something different from what your website offers and this will certainly result in a high bounce rate for you website.

b. Ad Copy
These represent your website in the paid web search category and if the representation you get is not apt for your website then the likelihood of your website having a high bounce rate will be high as well.

c. Page Title and Meta Tagging
Search engines usually display the page title and meta description in the search results snippets and if your page title and meta tags is not connected or related to your webpage content, you can certainly increase the likelihood of high bounce rate.

External Factors

a. Irrelevant results from Search Engines

There are times when search engines list irrelevant results from a search and if your website happens to be one of these then most probably your visitor will just close it.

b. Improper External links

It’s rare but it can happen. If an external website links to your site that makes use of an anchor text that is not related then most probably your website will be closed by the visitor.

High bounce rate can destruct your website’s conversion path, but actually its pretty simple to fix. If you’ve not given any attention to your sites bounce rate before, start doing it today. It might create dramatic improvement in your website.

If you have a name in mind for a new company then you should be aware that doing something like searching for the availability of the domain can be dangerous in today’s world of domain name research thievery. What rogue companies are doing is stealing domain names by intercepting your research and then registering the name for themselves. These companies can be avoided though and you just have to be cautious and alert.

Here we have some tips that may help you. In order to avoid being victimized by these rogue companies, be sure to avoid address bar guessing and avoid using search engines that fail to generate billion dollar revenues on an annual basis, i.e except the big ones! Most of the time, people have the strong urge to enter a domain name in the address bar to see if an existing company has already taken it but this is actually the most dangerous thing you could do because ISPs normally sell NXD data (non-existent domain).

The buyers register the domains which have the potential of generating the most money based on the visitor count for the particular domains. Smaller search engines on the other hand are the ones usually approached by data-mining firms and because these engines are looking for other revenue sources revealing what people are searching for becomes a potential income stream.

There are browse plug-ins that send information back to the Internet and these should be avoided as well. Browser plug-ins are usually free and just like anything that comes at no expense you should be critical of the catch. Most of the time, these get data and send them back to the Internet and as previously mentioned this is one of the most common data-mining tactics used by rogue companies.

Finally, always go directly to trusted registrars and who-is companies. Data is always valuable once sold and this is what most ISPs do. Trusted who-is websites are those that offer protection in such a way that they do not allow data-mining and are required to file official service plans before gaining permission to sell data.

When it comes to domain name tasting practices, the protocol is for companies to use algorithms and not resort to mining queries for the information they need but sadly the reverse is happening as we speak. With a number of companies tasting as much as 50,000 domain names a day, you should be more protective with your ideas as they can easily fall into the wrong hands in an instant.

• The most important thing is to be able to increase your linkability. You can definitely achieve this through blogs, excellent content and link bait.
• It is really necessary to guide your users into tagging and social bookmarking your website. Let them tag, Digg and bookmark your website. If you are using a WordPress platform, it is a good idea to use the Sociable plug-in for this purpose.
• If you have noticed carefully some Google and Yahoo blogs, they actually have a system for rewarding inbound links. Why not introduce this on your own blog? You could do this by listing them as recently linking blogs, through permalinks and through TrackBacks.
• Diversification of content is a good idea. This is going to have your content reach beyond the premises of a browser.
• Let other people find you useful. In the very first place, it is very important that you create something new and useful and then try to make it into something that other people can use to create something different. So, thinking outside the box is very important.
• Many people make the mistake of not realizing the importance of outbound linking. This is actually a good way of becoming a user resource and even though this might not help you in the short term, it is definitely going to help you in the long-term.

• Have you ever thought of recognizing your valuable users and readers? Some kind of rewarding system is definitely going to take your blog to the next level.
• Participation is very important and you should participate in similar blogs and websites organically. It goes without mention that if you have a good reputation on Digg.com, it’s going to take your blog to the next level – but don’t try to force it.
• Understanding the audience is of utmost importance. If you do not understand what your people want to read and also the kind of demography that you want to cater to, you should invest in some research and try to figure these things out.
• Content is of utmost importance that you should be able to understand the kind of content that would be able to appeal better to your audience.
• Whatever you do, make sure it’s real! No one likes to be fooled and that’s not going to help you in the long run.
• It is very natural for some people to get carried away and forget their past; however, that does not help in the long run. If you want to establish authenticity, you should respect all people that helped you achieve whatever you have.
• You should definitely figure out the risk benefit ratio, but it is actually a good idea to not be afraid of trying new things – just go ahead and try new tools, products and challenges; something might just click for you.

According to Internet Marketing discussions, any type of content that encourages people to pass on the message is referred as ‘Viral’ and the strategy behind it is called as ‘viral marketing’. In simple words its just about creating a buzz that becomes viral! Everyone wants to see it, and when they do, they all want to share it.

Where is the virus, is it contagious?

People always wonder why the word ‘viral’ is used, how a marketing strategy can relate to virus! Well, in off web terms such marketing is referred to as ‘word of mouth’ or ‘network marketing’ but on the internet they call it ‘viral marketing’ because it matches perfectly with the lifestyle of a virus!

Virus lives secretly till it becomes numerous enough to overcome the host. He rides the host and uses its resources to grow his community. He keeps on replicating himself exponentially with geometrically increasing power that doubles with each loop. Thus a virus strength and population can explode in very short time. Like viruses, viral marketing strategies assume delayed gratification. They use benefit of rapid multiplication to toot their message to thousands of readers through people forwarding emails with links to friends or encouraging them to visit specific websites or watch the interesting videos.

Hereby I have collected few important elements to be considered while unleashing a viral marketing campaign. Needless to say that, more of the following elements are covered, better the results are likely to be.

1. Giving away products or services

“Cheap” or “inexpensive” is likely to generate a wave of interest but “free” being the most powerful word in a marketer’s dictionary, will surely do it fairly quick. One can give away anything like free piece of software, ebook, cool smilies and so on to attract attention. ‘Free’ attracts people who then look for other desirables that you are selling and bingo, you got a sell! It also helps you in list building and generating advertisement revenue as well.

Furthermore you can give your visitors an incentive. Ask them to spread your script, ebook etc. Instead, give them a bonus for recommending you. The way to make an ebook go viral is to make it brandabele. It means that you allow others to add their details, or the affiliate links to your ebook. Put it in a pdf format so that everyone may use it, because Adobe works on every computer. To proliferate it even more you may consider using Joint Venture  partners to launch your eBook. If you can send it to a network of JV partners with huge email lists, that’s it; all your marketing will be complete.

One free ebook called “Search Engine Tactics” by Mark Joyner, has been downloaded over one million times! And of course more people like me talking about it are helping nothing but to spread the virus even more!

2. Making people feel something

The second most beneficial element would be to create a very strong emotion. You need to have a perspective, to express an idea with commitment and dedication. You should be able to exploit common human motivations and behaviors of people. Fill them with love or hate, please them or make angry, sometimes be an idiot or a genius, sometimes compassionate or egoistic.

Forget neutral, viral marketing is all about emotions.

3. Doing something unexpected

This one is very obvious and well suits to video marketing through youtube and others. What type of videos you would like to watch until you see the name of sponsor? has to be hilarious or unexpected. If you want viewers to notice you campaign, you must be doing something surprising, something that is not expected. Forget about trying to promote your services as just being expert because everybody does the same! Don’t expect a win just because your campaign looks cool, as already many others have “been there, done that”.

4. Using existing communication networks

Except few basement-dwelling computer geeks most people are social. A person may have close networks of 8-12 people as well as the weaker networked relationships with hundreds, if not thousands.

What popularized “Follow me on twitter” buttons in recent days? People’s desire to be popular, loved, and understood in their network. On internet people develop relationships with social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, blogging, social bookmarking and videos. All of these are highly viral because they are interactive. Learn to place your message into their existing communications, and you rapidly multiply its distribution.

5. Allowing effortless transfers and never to restrict access

Sharing is what viral marketing is all about. In flu season, we are advised to stay away from people who cough and asked to wash hands often, not to touch eyes, nose, or mouth because virus can only spread when its easy to transmit! In the same way everything that makes the sharing easier, improves your viral marketing campaign.

Allow people to,

• Download the content, in a usable format (videos in MPG, pictures in JPG etc.)
• Embed the content on their sites
• Send it to friends  (use Tell a Friend Scripts etc.)
• Publish it on various social networks – Digg, YouTube etc.
• Add it to social bookmarking sites

Viral marketing is about spreading like virus, never about exclusivity so don’t want them to,

• Register or become members
• Download special software
• Enter “unlock” code
• Do something in order to get the right link

Viral marketing allows you to enter the market sections you may not reach otherwise but its main benefit is that it automates itself once your campaign spreads and then can keep on bringing targeted traffic to your site for any length of time. You may not profit today, or tomorrow, but if you can generate a buzz of interest from something, then you will profit soon and for the rest of your life! Moreover, instant communication being so easy and inexpensive on internet, a well designed viral marketing campaign creates a win-win situation.

Use all the fundamental principles of viral marketing outlined above and Start turning your web site visitors into part of your online sales force!

Defining a duplicate content

Content is considered duplicate when considerable part of it is exactly or partially similar to other webpage in same or different website. There are many reasons that can create duplicate content on same site which is likely to be considered non-malicious,

• Blog content accessible directly from post, via Category, Author, archives and RSS/Atom Feed.
• Forum replies creating multiple urls pointing to same page
• common sales elements, lengthy copywrite text on many pages of a site.
• Print-only versions of articles not pointing to original
• Same store items linked via multiple distinct URLs
• www and non-www versions of same page etc.

Different sites with similar content Pages,

Many webmasters assume that creating multiple or identical copies of the same content/page will either increase their chances of ranking for many long tail keywords or help them get multiple listings to win more traffic. There is nothing wrong in syndicating your content across different sites while taking due care about providing authenticate ownership of content.

However, in some cases its looked as a malicious practice when content is duplicated across different sites to deliberately trick the search engines into returning incompatible and poor quality search results with the same content repeated within a set of results.

Duplicate content penalty

Actually there is nothing called ‘duplicate content penalty’.  Penalties are faced when Google perceives that you are trying to manipulate the search results by employing unscrupulous techniques like paid links, excessive link building with same anchor text, doorway sites etc. that results in preventing your site from showing up in top positions despite of how many backlinks it has or how low the competition is. They usually push down a search result by 30, 60, 90, 350 and 950 positions depending on the nature of penalty even though the page previously ranked number one.

Duplicate content is treated very differently. Here’s an abstract from official Google’s blog about handling such practices,

In the rare cases in which we perceive that duplicate content may be shown with intent to manipulate our rankings and deceive our users, we’ll also make appropriate adjustments in the indexing and ranking of the sites involved. However, we prefer to focus on filtering rather than ranking adjustments … so in the vast majority of cases, the worst thing that’ll befall webmasters is to see the “less desired” version of a page shown in our index.

It recommends that for a page its unlikely to be totally out of Google’s index just because of content duplication (unless there are other factors involved like MFA or doorway site, spammy looking domain, no or very few inbound links etc.)  In order to make a search more relevant to a user, pages with too much duplicate content are simply filtered and sent to ‘supplemental index’ (It is the place where less trusted result is sent when Google is not sure what to do with it but doesn’t want to throw it away).

Pages in supplemental index rarely rank, not often crawled and doesn’t carry any backlinking value thus the worst thing that may happen is to have ‘more desired’ version of page thrown into the supplemental index. Its similar to using a sieve to remove unwanted particles while, good particles sometimes can get filtered out accidentally.

Basically, when a search engine spider crawls a site, it reads the html pages and stores the content in its database. Then, it compares its findings to other information from its database and detects the exact percentage of duplication. A page with more duplicate content simply scores low on content-based algorithmic factors. However, Google search rankings are based on 200+  elements, among which a very small set of factors are actually based on the content in page body. Thus depending upon other vital components like relevancy score, inbound links, trust rank and so on, it then scales the final rankings and filters out the pages that qualify to be much duplicate and also of low quality.

How to know if a site is in the Supplemental Index

Well, I am not sure if there is any better way to check if a site is in supplemental index. I usually look for the results in Google returned by:

site:www.yourdomain.com (returns every page indexed)

and

site:/www.yourdomain.com (returns every page in the main index)

The difference in above two searches detects the pages from your site that are in supplemental index.

As far as its concerned about the duplicate content on the same site, don’t get confused to see the supplemental results even if you are not having any of the conditions mentioned earlier that create duplicate content, as there can be other reasons as well like old pages going supplemental if you have recently used 301 redirects to new ones. Thus you may just need to give it a time, but also need to make sure that there are no CMS errors delivering the same content at multiple URLs or canonicalization errors like www vs non-www. Try to tweak robots.txt file to stop Google indexing junk pages, use sitemap files to point to preferred URLs, use webmaster tools to fine-tune parameter handling and wherever needed, implement noindex meta tags for e.g. on archive pages in blogs, print-only pages etc.

If you syndicate your content to other sites then make sure that all the copies have link back to original version and to further ensure about your site being served in SERPs you would want to ask those sites to block their version through robots.txt.

The duplicate content filter sometimes comes out to be harsh even with sites that don’t mean to manipulate the search results anyway for e.g.  when story submitted to highly credible site like digg ranks better than original site or someone with higher authority republishing content by scraping is considered original which may even keep a new site out of index. In such cases don’t mind to point some link popularity at that part of your site instead of just making it flow to home page.

Finally it’s in your hands to make the search engines trust your site to be unique. I am sure that the things discussed in this article will definitely help you to understand the duplicate content filter and keep your site unique and fresh.

Imitate natural backlinking profile

What smart link builders do is emulate a natural link profile and this means that what they focus on is not getting hundreds of profile links or spammed comments but getting links that satisfy attributes including placement with anchor text, positioning on various IP ranges, and a consideration of diverse types of websites like web 2.0, article directories and such. An effective link builder is always aware of this and acts accordingly.

Focus on quality, its not a number game

Another habit of effective link builders is that what they focus on rather than quantity is the quality of the links they get. A large quantity of spammed back links can always be outperformed by several trusted and high authority back links. Next, instead of putting emphasis on SEO, they address branding and general visibility. When it comes to the Internet, the primarily goal is to increase your visibility thus increasing sales and you will gain more from a valid interview rather than some kind of comment in some person’s blog page.

Be organized and give value for value

Effective link builders are organized people who can easily keep track of certain kinds of data for analysis from email conversion speeds to site receptiveness and the like. Time is always maximized because they know what is happening the minute it happens. When asking for value, effective link builders offer value wherein they always consider providing incentives for others so that they will help you out. Basically, this can be compared with writing a relevant article before you put it up for syndication. Another example is making a donation to a website before attempting to get them to add your link.

Be persistent and work smarter

Persistent is a word that describes effective link builders well considering how well they handle the time consuming task of building links. Expect slow but calculated campaigns for emails may not be responded to at first and viral content may not be able to reach the right channels as soon as you want it to. There is no room to waste time in this case and making the most out of your time is going to be your best bet.

Finally, effective link builders do not only work harder but they work smarter too as they can deliver great results without having the need to spend much time doing so. What they resort to is content optimization and site building practices that attracts the right kind of links for each particular website. What they do here is make websites act as link magnets that can attract high quality and useful links.

Well, we all are here for gaining traffic to our websites because the sites that can drive traffic make the most profit, especially the targeted traffic from Google and other search engines. Thus search engine marketers have been exploring different ways to win top rankings and more traffic…some good, some ‘black hat’…every time they find something new they don’t forget to shout ‘eureka’ and start selling their killing secrets to us like anything! I am not against this approach as being an online seller I would like to use as many marketing tactics as I can. But then its Google who doesn’t want their searcher to get deceived with some new non trusted result which sometimes is unfair for new businesses actually willing to work hard for their clients and instead want some trust in Google.

Of course nobody would like to wait for 4-5 years so that their site gets old enough, have gazillion inbound links blah blah…so they always try to crack search engine algorithms to break the queue of old players but on the next turn Google finds it and devaluate…same is the case with “link wheel” strategy invented and marketed by some SEO wannabe!

Basic link wheel system

Link wheel building is about having 5 or so pages (spokes) belonging to popular web 2.0 platforms like squidoo, WordPress, Hubpages etc and in some cases article directories, pointing to each other and then to your site (money page) in an attempt to improve its rankings in Google’s organic search. Essentially you try to gather link juice from pages with related content and then point it to site in center. You would then social bookmark all the spokes to further add to the benefit of process. You could also create sub-wheels i.e. the small wheel around one of the spokes in main wheel that simulates a natural internet setup like primary level spokes with handful of inbound links and then linked to from secondary level spokes those too had backlinks but not as many as the latter, and so on.

Actually the concept has been pretty common to interlink WebPages from different sites/blogs to have your own network of backlinks but when a fancy name was slapped on it, people dreamed of a overnight miracle and fell all over themselves to get it.

The special thing involved here was wheeling with web 2.0 properties and popular article directories those are considered to be highly authorized on any given topic for obvious reasons like more and more people interacting and adding fresh content to them. It is observed that squidoo or scribd pages can rank on page one for even competitive keywords due to their authority and solid internal linking structure that sends link juice and relevancy to new pages.

Google supposedly looked at link wheels like natural networks and boosted the targeted pages up in search results. But as usual the effect didn’t last long and link wheels were caught on by mid to late 2009.

What went wrong?

We all know that Google has sufficiently intelligent algorithm for tracking any process such as link farming that tries to manipulate the organic search results but we do not know how it works exactly. However, it won’t be wrong to consider that more and more people using the same technique will definitely attract attention and if Google finds it artificial, they will penalize or degrade its use. Many of us believe that this is what happened to link wheels.

Till the beginning of 2009 (when it was first cited as marketing secret) and even for some time later everything worked fine. Then Google’s ever changing algorithm got wise and started tracing the link wheels and disregard the links in it that resulted in de-indexing of spokes and in some cases the money pages also got wiped out from index.

Such a overnight breakdown with link wheel system obviously was shocking for marketers especially to those who were successfully selling the stuff to others on different webmaster forums and on dedicated websites!, such as link wheel creation services, ebooks etc.

Are link wheels dead?

Yes, from where I am standing! People have tried to evolve the system so as to leave fewer footprints. They tried using all unique articles instead of some spinned content, keeping the loop open, complicating the interlinking (I wonder what made them think that they can create something that will puzzle a computer program), not creating all the spokes at once etc. Also there have been slight variations of link wheel like ‘link pyramids’ and ‘blog wheels’ (I love these names:D) but eventually Google will know it all!

In the case of very low competition, link wheel may have some effect unless neither of the spokes is de-indexed, penalized or nofollowed.

Final nail in the coffin!

Until now most of the popular web 2.0 platforms and article sites are aware of the fact that they are being abused by few marketers those are intended just to manipulate search rankings and not at all to place quality content that will be of great interest to their users. Therefore at few places now you can not have outbound links unless you publish required number of articles. At some other places they will delete your account without any notice if links are found sneaky and embedded in crappy content.

Thus if you are thinking about link wheel building then most likely it will be viewed as spam by publishing platform itself before search engines.

Conclusion: Stop wasting time

If you are a small business owner then I would suggest you to stop wasting time on link wheels. Anyway it decreases the quality of internet. Still if you think that its worth the time and effort, ask yourself whether you would like to create some valuable content on your site or rather the same content on some other site!

First of all let me clear few things,

Nofollow can be applied in two ways, either through Meta tags or link attribute.

You may make a specific link nofollow like rel=”nofollow” – generally reffered as nofollow attribute

Or use <meta name=”robots” content=”nofollow” /> to make all the links nofollow on that page – referred as nofollow tag

Similarly you can do with noindex. rel=noindex applicable for destination page and meta tag applicable for host page

Next is robots.txt file that is well known to webmasters for preventing search engines to crawl and index entire site or specific parts of it.

Nofollow

Here’s what Google says,

• The Googlebot does not follow any link with nofollow attribute nor the links on a page with nofollow meta tag
• If a page has got only nofollow backlinks, it is not likely to be indexed or shown.
• No pagerank or link juice will be passed from a nofollow backlink.
• There is no attribution assigned to a webpage, through nofollow backlinks on authority domains.

Here’s what Yahoo says,

• Despite of nofollow attribute or meta tag, the links are crawled and outbound links are discoverd.
• If a page has got only nofollow backlinks it is still indexed and shown whenever crawler finds it.
• No anchor text value or link juice is given to the landing page.
• Similarly, no trust is passed through nofollow backlinks from authority sites.

Conclusion: Its not completely true that search engines don’t see the target of nofollow links. Although nofollow links may not transmit any value in terms of pagerank, anchor text or trust factor; they still count as a backlink and their collective influence might be considerable in search engine rankings. However, you can use it effectively on internal links of your site to sculpt PageRank.

Noindex

Here’s what Google says,

• Page with noindex is followed by Google and links on it are crawled (unless it is used in conjunction with nofollow)
• Google does not index or show any page with noindex meta tag nor a page that has only backlink with rel=noindex.
• Page with noindex tag still flows a pagerank and link juice towards its outbound links, same with noindex attribute on links

Here’s what Yahoo says,

• Yahoo crawlers follow a Page with noindex and links on it are crawled (regardless of being used in conjunction with nofollow)
• Yahoo can index and show a ‘noindexed’ page as far as its heavily linked to with related anchor text. (It appears as only url and no snippet in SERPs because anchor text relevancy is considered here, not any terms on that page)
• Link juice and trust is passed to destinations found on noindex pages.

Conclusion: Using noindex tag for preventing a page to be displayed in search engine return pages may be a good solution in case of Google but not in yahoo. If that page is quite relevant to search querry on the measure of backlinking anchor text, Yahoo! is anyway going to show its url in search results (as a reference link from other indexed web pages) though with no title and description i.e. snippet.

Robots.txt

Google and Yahoo both say,

• Pages restricted in robots.txt are not at all crawled, nor the links on it, are followed.
• Here in this case the page is not indexed but Google and Yahoo can still show its URL in their SERPs for the same reason of anchor text relevancy. (Again no search engine snipptes as no data is retrieved from site itself, though DMOZ/ODP data can be used by Google and Yahoo directory data by Yahoo)
• A page can still consume pagerank and/or link juice to outbound links.

Conclusion: Google bot and Yahoo’s spider both seem to be obeying robots.txt, since they are not crawling or indexing the contents on the page. But they sometimes show URLs in their SERPs that are not indexed if found highly relevant for the search terms.

Unless using some creative solution you can not stop Yahoo from doing it, however you can remove such a result from Google (or generally any page that is already indexed and showing up in SERPs for whatever reason) by doing as follows,

• Add Noindex meta tag on the page
• Unblock the page in robots.txt file and let Google crawl it
• Submit a webpage removal request via Google WMT (Webmaster Tools)

To revise the different approaches of Google and Yahoo, here is the simple chart I made:

*If they think that the page would be a good resource for a web-searcher based on the anchor text of backlinks.

**If there are no other pages linking to it without nofollow

I hope you will use this informtion to manage different issues those often arise for sitemap pages, affiliate links,  404 error pages, insignificant pages, duplicate contents, pages with sensitive information and so on

P.S: No information in the world is valid forever. Make sure that you check recent posts regarding the topic:)