Product ratings causing 302 redirect problem

[BlinkWeb]

I am working on an ecommerce site and my crawl report came back with 7000+ 302 redirects and maxed out at 10,000 pages because of all the redirects. The site really only has maybe 1500 pages (dynamic content aside).

After looking into it a little more I see it is because of the product rating system. They have a star rating system that kinda looks like amazons. The only problem is that each star is a link to a dynamic address that records the vote and then 302's back to the original page the vote was cast from.

So virtually every page on this site links out anywhere from 15 to 45 times and 302's back to itself, losing virtually all of its PR.  Am I correct in that assumption or am I missing something? I don't see the links being blocked by robots.txt or noindex, nofollowed. Also it is an anonymous rating system where a rating can be cast from any category page displaying a product or any product page. To make matters worse every page links to a printable version which duplicates the issue by repeating the whole thing over again.

So assuming I am correct that is site has a major PR leak on virtually every page, what is the best recommendation to fix this.

1. Block all of those links in robots.txt,

2. no index, nofollow these links or

3. put the rating system behind a submit button or disallow anon ratings

4. something else???

Looking at their product ratings on the site virtually everything is between 2-3 starts  out of 5 and has about the same number of votes except less votes on deeper pages. I dont believe this is real at all since this site gets almost no traffic and maybe 1 sale a week, there is no way that any product has been rated 50 times. I think the crawler is voting as it crawls and doing it 5 times for every product which is why everything is rated 2.5 out of 5.

This is an x-cart site in case anyone cares.

Any suggestions?

[BlinkWeb]

Ok so I am trying to figure out the best way to add 50,000 links to the robots.txt file and future proof it so we dont have to keep adding manually to the file whenever a new product is added. I am not all that familar with x-cart.

Here is how the urls i want to block are formated...

website.com/store/product.php?mode=add_vote&productid=XXXXXX&vote=100"

Would adding "Disallow: /product.php" work?

Or should I "Disallow: /product.php?mode=add_vote&productid" <---will that work?

Would this have any consequences I am not thinking of?

[DanDeceuster]

First of all, I don't know of a way to noindex a link. Noindex is a robots meta tag that goes in the head section of an html document to inform search engines not to index the content of that page.

In your situation, I would first block every one of those url's with a robots.txt file and make absolutely sure that none of them appear in your sitemap.

Then I would add the rel="nofollow" tag to every one of those links.

I would not take away user reviews and ratings as Google loves to see that, especially if you advertise in adwords. I have seen sites get banned for the lack of such functionality.

Try those two fixes and see how it goes. I would say 301 instead of 302 those pages, but I think the functionality of x-cart needs them to be 302, but I could be wrong.