There’s an important but subtle difference between using meta robots and using robots.txt to prevent indexation of a page. Using meta robots “noindex,follow” allows the link equity going to that page to flow out to the pages it links to. If you block the page with robots.txt, you’re just flushing that down the toilet.
In the example above, I’m blocking pages that aren’t real pages — they’re tracking scripts — so I’m not losing link equity, as these pages DO NOT have the header with the main menu links, etc.
Think of a page like a Contact Us page, or a Privacy Policy page — probably linked to by every single page on your site via either the main menu or the footer menu. So there’s a ton of link juice going to those pages; do you just want to throw that away? Or would you rather let that link equity flow out to everything in your main menu? Easy question to answer, isn’t it?
