MKN - Affiliate Marketing

I ask this question, probaly too myself, as chances are no other affiliate will read this, but fine I’m used to talking too myself anyway, but I shall carry on.

For a few weeks now, I have been having affiliate link codes hidden using a jump.php or similarly named file.

So for example jump.php?tesco so when that link is clicked, the tracking code kicks in within the jump.php file.

I saw redirect pages, that I did not want in search engines, as it is just producing quite a few pages with this information within results.

Now I thought about the robots.txt to disallow bots from indexing these pages, so for the past couple of days, I had a robots disallow for the jump.php page.

Now the website in question makes sales every day, pretty much without fail, infact 99.99% makes sales every day.

For the past couple of days, I used the robots.txt to see no sales, despite the click thrus still being the same normal volume, now again for today, again high volume of click thrus and no sales.

So I Google the same question that I am writing about now, does having robots.txt disallow cookie tracking?

This may just be conciendence, but this evening when I had yet again made no sale, I thought about it, and decided to remove the robots.txt from the domain name, and low and behold about 30 minutes after removing it, I make a sale.

I could not personally put hand on heart, and say that robots.txt does affect cookie tracking, but I personally would never use it again to stop bots from indexing that page just incase. Having made no sales in one and a bit days, and then to remove it and later make a sale, it might just be coincidence, or it might actually do more harm than good.