Making sure googlebot is not spamming my mailbox

Question

I have got a website running with an option to report abuse of functionality. This is being done by clicking a link. After the link is clicked the webmaster will get a report of the location where the content is that was reported as abuse. I have added an rel="NOFOLLOW" to the href of the particular links but this is not helping. It seems that this tag is only being used to check wheter a page has to be ranked or not. How can i Exclude googlebot from clicking those abuse links?

This is what a link looks like:

<a href="domainname.com/blaat.aspx?reportabuse={5478957234234289347}">Click me</a>

Any bright ideas about how to make sure i won't have 38 e-mails in my mailbox after a weekend would be much appreciated!

Answer 1

The way I would go is have the report abuse email be behind a POST form of some kind. For example, a drop down box to select the issue or a text box to write in some comment about the abuse. Another method would be to style the form submit button so that it looked like a link and use that in place of your current link if you didn't want to have another step.

Answer 2

I'd do this in two parts:

1. By default, I'd make the link take you to a page where you report the abuse via a (very short, friendly) form, one where if you don't want to, you don't even have to choose anything, just click the Report button. Clicking the Report button (or a cancel link) takes you back where you were.

2. I'd include JavaScript that would test if the user has modern browser features (DOM node creation and such) and, if so, change the action of the link so that when they click it, the form appears right there (in a small overlay box) rather than taking you to a separate page. That makes for a less-intrusive user experience. Either way, though, the end result is a form being submitted rather than simply a link being followed.