keeping affiliate pages out of the index

[proboscis]

In a recent reconsideration request I promised google that I would keep all my affiliate pages blocked in robots.txt and I will - but when I first did it I blocked all robots not thinking about yahoo and msn where I'm not having problems and who used to show my affilite pages for some searches.

Now I want to change my robots.txt to block these pages only from googlebot so yahoo and msn can still show them if they want.

The thing I'm wondering is will a change like that affect my google traffic? I don't want to set anything off since I am still in the process of slowly recovering from some penalty or filter.

The pages are nothing but affiliate content except for a link at the bottom of the page that leads back to my original useful content related to the affiliate products.

[Simsi]

You can seperate out your Google disallows from the others in robots.txt easily enough and it should have no bearing on rankings, but if your pages are as you say, nothing but affiliate content, and not really offering up unique, useful content, I'd have thought that that in itself is likely to see you drop over time.

Have you considered sending your affiliate links out via a redirect script and disallow/nofollow that script to keep things simple and minimise the number of external links? You could also centralise your aff links into one file at the same time to make maintenance easy.

[edited by: Simsi at 11:59 pm (utc) on Dec. 27, 2008]