301 redirect or Robots.txt on an interstatial page
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Hey guys,
I have an affiliate tracking system that works like this : an affiliate puts up a certain code on his site, for example : www.domain.com/track/aff_id
This url leads to a page where the hit is counted, analysed and then 302 redirects to my sales page with the affiliates ID in the url : www.mysalespage.com/?=aff_id.
However, we've noticed recently that one affiliate seems to be ranking for our own name and the url google indexed was his tracking url (domain.com/track/aff_id). Which is strange because there is absolutely nothing on that page, its just an interstatial page so that our stats tracking software can properly filter hits.
To remove the affiliate's url from showing up in the serps, I've come up with 2 solutions :
1 - Change the redirect to a 301 redirect on his track page.
2 - Change our robots.txt page to block all domain.com/track/ pages from being indexed.
My question is : if I 301 redirect instead of 302, will I keep the affiliates from outranking me for my own name AND pass on link juice or should I simply block google from crawling the interstatial tracking pages?
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301 redirect it and you will be able to pass most of the link juice to your sales page.
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