Block spider access to outlinks?

**Harvester-of-Sorrow** · 30-09-09

Is it a good idea to block bots from following outlinks?
By outlink, I mean a redirect url on your site which goes to the affiliate network.

Google is spending a lot of time following these on my site and I have over 1 million of them. All its getting out of them are the 301 redirects to the affiliate network.

It would be better for them to spend their resources indexing the rest of my site.

Good or bad idea to deny access to the links via robots.txt?
Wouldn't want do damage to rankings by trying to hide things.

Thanks!

**warren_p** · 30-09-09

Ever since I started using redirects I have had a robots.txt disallowing redirect.php, however, I am not sure if using the robots.txt would have a detrimental affect if these links are already indexed.

I would wait for more advice but I would certainly use the robots.txt so that Google knows that your actual site is the most important thing to be crawling and not your affiliate links.

**j4shaw99** · 30-09-09

Have you tried the rel="nofollow" attribute?

**Brendon** · 30-09-09

>> Have you tried the rel="nofollow" attribute?

Um, thats not how it works. Let Google see whats there, and make their own decisions. Unless oyu have a pretty decent grasp of how it all works, you're more likely to do harm than good

**trooperbill** · 06-10-09

theres no point in using rel=nofollow any more as it doesnt re-use the juice, it evapourates instead meaning its actually harming your site (or at least wasting juice) that could go towards another site...

mtt cutts advice is to drop nofollow althgether especially on internal pages.