SiteMap and Robots.txt Indexing

What is the right way to avoid it?

[kitamed]

I have an ecommerce site with 40+ products. Each product page has a link to recommend the product to a friend (Tell a Friend about this product.
My problem is that Google has been indexing many of these "Tell a Friend" pages instead of the products themselves so I was wondering what is the right way to avoid this?

All these ”Tell a Friend” pages are included in the sitemap.xml and I assigned a much lower priority from the very beginning than the products pages. I was wondering what is the right way to correct this? Should I keep the sitemap the way it is and create entries on the robot.txt to avoid indexing of these pages ? or should I remove these "Tell a Friend" entries from the sitemap ?

I appreciate in advance your help and suggestions.

[goodroi]

Im guessing you need to adjust your link juice flow. Make sure that the "Tell A Friend" page links back to the referrring page. Then go to the product page and make sure not too much link juice is flowing to the "Tell A Friend" page while you contact outside websites and get them to link to your product pages. Basically you want the link juice to be much higher for your product pages and lower for your tell a friend pages.

Another solution is to simply add the "tell a friend" box to the product page which would combine the link juice.

[kitamed]

goodroi,
Thank you very much for your response.

The way is working right now is that every product page has a "Tell a friend about this site or product" link; this link takes you to another page in my site where you enter the sender's and recpient's information, email etc. and also you enter a gotcha code to prevent spam. There are no links to external sites. Your second suggestion is really the way it is set up ?
I guess the problem is that every product page has one of these links, and maybe is making it a higher juice page since there are many of them ?
Based on this info would you have any other suggestions ?

P.D. I'll read more about OPtimize Link Juice. Thanks for the tip !
Thanks again !

[goodroi]

another suggestion is to ask a seo friend to look at and see if you are overlooking something. sometimes when we stare at problems too long we miss an easy fix.

[kitamed]

goodroi,
Thank you again.
Unfortunately, I don't have any SEO friends, that is the main reason I was trying to look for help in this forum. I wish I had....
Thanks !