> But what about being closer to the top of the Google search results - you might ask? One, search engines crawling websites directly is only one variable in ge

> But what about being closer to the top of the Google search results - you might ask? One, search engines crawling websites directly is only one variable in getting a higher search engine ranking. References from other websites will also factor into that. As far as I remember from google search console, a disallow directive in robots.txt causes google not only to avoid crawling the page, but also to eventually remove the page from its index. It certainly shouldn't add any more pages to its index, external references or not.