I have a directory of pages, one for each product that I'm advertising, and each page redirects to the actual page of the product but with my affiliate link. I have many links with targeted anchor text linking to these redirect pages. I'm wondering if I should create a robots.txt and disallow access to the directory, because I remember reading Google does not like these and considers them spam (the html meta refresh redirets) as well as the affiliate links? If I do disallow access, will the anchor text lose its value, because it is linking to a file that I have disallowed search engines to access? Thanks.
Hold on, if you're using lots of links everywhere to (presumably) get a high keyword search rating, disallowing it in robots.txt will circumvent all that work and disallow search engines from indexing it at all. If your links are just ads, and you want them to get clicked on by real customers, then that should be okay I think... Lastly, you could solve ALL of your problems by linking to a good selling landing page... which then could be indexed by search engines AND link your sales page. good luck!
I think this Google hate for directory redirects is BS. I have a ton of them and I don't see any punishment.