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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.

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".

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

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...

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

Personally, I use the "follow" attribute on links to useful resources as it can make a page more relevant if you are linking to authority sites on a particular topic. I can't see why you would be penalized, unless you are linking to off topic spammy sites.