Blocking URL's with specific parameters from Googlebot

[aethereal]

Hi,

I've discovered that Googlebot's are voting on products listed on our website and as a result are creating negative ratings by placing votes from 1 to 5 for every product. The voting function is handled using Javascript, as shown below, and the script prevents multiple votes so most products end up with a vote of 1, which translates to "poor".

How do I go about using robots.txt to block a URL with specific parameters only? I'm worried that I might end up blocking the whole product listing, which would result in de-listing from Google and the loss of many highly ranked pages.

DON'T want to block:

http://www.mysite.com/product.php?productid=1234

WANT to block:

http://www.mysite.com/product.php?mode=vote&productid=1234&vote=2

Javacript button code:

onclick="javascript: document.voteform.submit();"

Thanks in advance for any advice given.

Regards,
Asim

[AlanMosley]

Good to hear, I am glad you perservered

[aethereal]

Tried them all now and all come back with "Success"... May be I'll post in the WMT Forum and see if anyone can shed light on this problem. Thanks for your help Alan, it's much appreciated.

[AlanMosley]

Yes correct, did you try the other formats?

[aethereal]

Tried "Fetch as Googlebot" in Diagnostics and it came back as "Success" so I guess the robots.txt directive is not working. I'm assuming it should have reported a failure message when attempting to fetch a URL containing "?mode=vote".

[AlanMosley]

Wrong place, go to diagnostics, then look for fetch as googlebot

[aethereal]

I added "Disallow: /mode=vote" to the robots.txt file and also manually entered it on Crawler Access page, then clicked "Test" and no errors were reported. The WMT page states that robots.txt was last downloaded 16 hours ago so I'll wait until it picks the file up again and then check for any errors. Hopefully that will do trick

[AlanMosley]

Try this in robots.txt, I did not think that Google allows wild cards but i just read that they do.

Disallow: /*mode=vote*

or

Disallow: /*mode=vote

or

Disallow: /*mode

Then try in Google WMT to read with googlebot to see if it works.

The first in the list seems right to me, but I have seen others do it the other ways.

[aethereal]

Thanks for the reply. The site was developed using PHP, mySQL and Javascript. I was hoping there was a way to do it without getting programmers involved...

[AlanMosley]

dont think you are going to do it in robots.txt, rather do a 301 from mode=vote to non mode vote.

If you dont know how to put this into practise, tell me what your site is built with, if it is ASP.NET, i will show you how to impliment, if not someone else should be able to help.