Should I use nofollow?

I run a directory that links out to different services and products (several hundred links). All the links are actually affiliate link codes through programs I've signed up to.

All external links on my directory page go through a php file and pass on variables for my own stats / record keeping.

Ex: mydomain dot com/track.php?ap=X&s=X&c=name&u=url to new site
(since i have a low post count I can put full urls)

ap = affprogram, s = site, c = campaign, u = url visitors are sent to when link is clicked

Does google see each link as an external link or internal page link?

Should I be adding rel="nofollow" to each link?

Would I be better off adding something like
User-agent: *
Disallow: /track*

to my robots.txt file?

no follow means googles bots when crawling your site wont follow the links to the external websites.

If you make them follow it only benefits the sites your linking to because its another way of google bots finding there sites, plus it will have a positive effect on there search engine ranking position.

I would nofollow these links. If track.php redirects with a 302, then it won't pass link juice anyway, but what you are doing is passing link juice from the internal pages to track.php, which, given that it is simply a jumper script and not designed to rank, is just leaching link juice that would be better spread around those pages of your site that you do want to rank.

Simply blocking track.php via robots.txt won't stop the leaching of link juice.

I understand what nofollow does. Since these are affiliate links they don't always lead directly to the domain so passing along link juice to them doesn't make sense.

As your links are affiliate links to other people's sites, I can't see what benefit it is to you to have do follow on those links

The redirect is actually urlencode(url) and is being redirected via the track.php script. So i'm not sure that it would be the same as 302 redirect. (I hope explained that technically correct)

Regardless of how the redirect is happening, you're saying all the link juice is being passed to track.php then? If so then as you said, it would make sense to nofollow the links.

Thx for your input / help

If they were direct links I would for sure use nofollow on them, but since they run through the track.php script I wasn't sure if it was needed.

Which is why I was trying to see if it would be best to just add the nofollow tag or to put the disallow in the robots.txt file.

I assume that the redirect is instigated through the use of php's header("Location:") function? If so, and unless you specify that it's a 301 through an additional header() call prior to it, php will automatically send out a "302 temporary redirect" header at the same time.

JagNet thanks for your help. Much appreciated.

I just confirmed that it is indeed using php's header["Location:"] function.

With that being the case, I should be using nofollow on these links then correct?

I would if it were my site. I personally use nofollow extensively on internal links to avoid link juice sinks, and so far have seen good results from doing so.