Masked links showing as 'restricted by robots.txt' in GWT

[shopnbag]

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Over the past couple of weeks I have noticed in Google Webmaster Tools a selection of my masked aff links showing up as being restricted by my robots.txt - even though my robots file does nothing of the sort.

I run a masking plugin on my Wordpress blog and have made the masked links keyword friendly instead of numeric or alphanumeric.

My understanding of this is that Google is restricting these selected links to stop them from showing in their index - which is fair enough in my opinion -- their masked to hide my aff id not for ranking purposes.

However, as this is my first stride into aff marketing I'm wondering if those that are a lot longer in the tooth in the aff marketing discipline has seen this before and could offer some quick advice.

[Barry]

Welcome to the forum

I would not worry about it as its look like your wordpress 'hop' is using a 302 header redirection which is why google is ignoring them. Google is not looking at a robots file but instead the response header of your redirect script.

(I am hoping that your website is your username.co.uk) as thats what I looked at.

Ta

Baz

[shopnbag]

Thanks Barry, for the quick response and yes your guesswork was correct

I normally don't panic about crawling errors in GWT but I hadn't used this plugin before and wondered about the impact it might have, hence my post wishing to seek out those that are wiser than I.