Could outside affiliate program affect search ranking?

[clearvision]

About 5 years ago we partnered with an affiliate program who provided us with code to show their products on our site. When it was first installed, these pages became indexed as if it was apart of our site, which meant over 8,000 pages of product.

This wasn't bad at first, but the titles were all similar and we were worried it would effect our search rankings so we blocked google in the robot.txt.

We get notices in our web analytics when one of these pages is no longer available (which means it is being crawled). Could this still be hurting our rankings if Google is not "really" blocking the crawls of our site and counting it towards/against us?

Side note, we went from a PR 7 site down to a PR3 site and search rankings are slowly declining.

[tedster]

On your sidenote about PR changes, members are still trying to sort out the recent PR changes. See Google toolbar PR Update - 27 September, 2008 [webmasterworld.com]

We get notices in our web analytics when one of these pages is no longer available (which means it is being crawled).

Does your analytics show that GOOGLEBOT is requesting those urls? I ask because ANY request for a removed would be reported in analytics.

And finally, I'd say that blocked affiliate pages would not cause you any negative ranking effects.

[clearvision]

Thanks Tedster, I appreciate your response.

Our Google Analytics report is showing dead pages that are generated by the affiliates database. I thought this meant Google crawled the pages at some point (even though they are blocked in our robot.txt).

These autogenerated pages are also listed in the Yahoo Search directing to our site.

Sorry to sound so dull, I just want to be sure I understand. If Google crawls these pages (as it appears they are with Google Analytics) and sees them as being physically on our site, could this be something counting against us within the Google calculations and slowly decreasing rankings?

I actually did a XenuSleuth (saw it somewhere on here ;) and found it's generating more like 27,000 pages linking out from our site.

[tedster]

These autogenerated pages are also listed in the Yahoo Search directing to our site.

Does your robots.txt block all bots or just googlebot? If your disallow rule is intended to be for all bots, then it may not be saying what you thing it is saying. You can check that with the robots.txt tool inside your Webmaster Tools account.

I'm really not clear on what you're saying about your Google Analytics report. If those pages have your GA code on them, then that's all it takes to show up in your report - no crawl needed.