E-Commerce: Random Cart ID Redirects
-
Hi All,
I'm having an ecommerce cart issue. Basically, each time a purchase is made, the cart pops up with a unique id (eg www.mysite.com/cart.php?action=add&product_id=3728), This is being caught by MOZ scans as an individual page in some instances.
Could I simply add Disallow: /cart.php to my robots.txt to nix this issue? In theory it should keep all subsequent query strings from being indexed, right?
Thanks!
-
I'm using Interspire's shopping cart system with a few modifications. There's absolutely no official support for it at this point, so I appreciate your help.
The cart is a standalone php page, so I think that just blocking that off should be sufficient.
Thanks!
-
No problem. What platform do you use, because you can include what CleverPhD said as well, it really just depends on how the headers of the template are generated. I am not familiar with a platform that uses directories for the cart pages, but I am sure that some exist. One thing to watch out for if you try to no follow a whole directory is, some carts put all of their secured (ssl) pages in the same place. This could include the contact page, which you want to leave index able. If you are not familiar with coding in the platform, I would avoid it, because if you got the conditional code wrong, you could de-index a portion of your site accidentally.
-
Thanks, Lesley. I've just added the cart page to the disallow list.
-
I would add, you want to also no follow, noindex all links to any of your shopping cart pages. Ideally, if you have your cart pages in a given folder, you can disallow the whole folder and take care of things as a group.
-
Generally you always disallow the cart page in e-commerce sites. The reason being is that some spiders like baidu, will make fake shopping carts when spidering your site. If you keep track of your abandoned cart rate, this will wreak havoc on your stats.
When you disallow the cart.php, it will keep the whole page from being indexed, which ideally is not a bad thing. More than likely the way your cart works is it uses ajax to post the product to that page silently to add it to the cart. But at the same time if you go to site.com/cart.php it will more than likely take you to the cart screen. There really is no inherit value in having that page indexed by search engines. If people are coming to that page, it will also skew your numbers when you are trying to figure why people are dropping out of the checkout process.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Avoid landing page redirects
Avoid landing page redirects for the following chain of redirected URLs. http://domainname.com/ https://domainname.com/ https://www.domainname.com/ Anyone know how to solve this issue the correct way?
Technical SEO | | Sammyh0 -
301 Redirects in subfolders
Hi, we're making our site into a static site but I would like to transfer the Google juice. Most of the links and database exist on subfolders though. Could I simply do 301 redirects on the subfolders and retain the value or does it have to be on the full domain?
Technical SEO | | Therealmattyd0 -
Help with 301 redirect code
Hi, I can't work out how to make this one work and would apreciate if someone could help.
Technical SEO | | Paul_MC
i have a series of folders from a old site that are in the structure:
/c/123456/bags.html (the "123456" changes and is any series of 6 digit numbers), and the "bags.html" changes depending on the product.
I need that to be 301 redirected to the following format:
/default/bags/bags.html0 -
Safe way to auto geo redirect
Hi, looking for a second opinion on this please.... I own a couple of web stores, one targets UK and the other USA (they are both the same store more or less just different products targeted at different location). The uk runs on a .co.uk domain and the US on a .us domain. Is there a safe way that I could auto redirect search engine traffic to the right location? Let's say the toys page of the .co.uk is ranking well in google uk and appears high in google us too, obviously I would want the USA users to visit the toys page for the US store rather than the UK one. Ideally I would employ a geo redirect script so if a USA user clicks on the UK domain they are redirected to the USA site but would Google frown on that? Hope that makes sense? Thanks
Technical SEO | | GrumpyCarl0 -
E-commerce solution and subdomain issues
Hello All,
Technical SEO | | CherieP
In light of Wil Reynold's closing keynote at Portland's Searchfest, I thought I might try posting here to get some advice. We run a family business on the side and we're looking at starting to use volusion.com for our e-commerce solution. The catch is we currently have a wordpress site summitmining.com running on thesis with great SEO. Ranking #1 & #2 for our highest trafficked terms. Ideally, I'd like Summitmining.com to direct to the Volusion store and then summitmining.com/blog to go to our wordpress installation BUT since the volusion site will be hosted with the company and they will not host our wordpress installation we'd have to use a subdomain instead of a subdirectory which I understand will be bad for SEO. Does anyone have any recommendation on how to set this up without totally screwing up our ranking OR any recommendations of an easy to use shopping cart (I've worked on a magento site before and it's too complex for us) that wouldn't require a separate or subdomain? Thank you so much!
-Cherie Prochaska
503-816-3557
cherie@c-squaredassociates.com
@cherieprochaska0 -
Do search engines treat 307 redirects differently from 302 redirects?
We will need to send our users to an alternate version of our homepage for a few hours for a certain event. The SEO task at hand is to minimize the chance of the special homepage getting crawled and cached in the search engines in place of our normal homepage. (This has happened in the past so the concern is not imaginary.) Among other options, 302 and 307 redirects are being discussed. IE, redirecting www.domain.com to www.domain.com/specialpage. Having used 302s and 301s in the past, I am well aware of how search engines treat them. A 302 effectively says "Hey, Google! Please get rid of the old content on www.domain.com and replace it with the content on /specialpage!" Which is exactly what we don't want. My question is: do the search engines handle 307s any differently? I am hearing that the 307 does NOT result in the content of the second page being cached with the first URL. But I don't see that in the definition below (from w3.org). Then again, why differentiate it from the 302? 307 Temporary Redirect The requested resource resides temporarily under a different URI. Since the redirection MAY be altered on occasion, the client SHOULD continue to use the Request-URI for future requests. This response is only cacheable if indicated by a Cache-Control or Expires header field. The temporary URI SHOULD be given by the Location field in the response. Unless the request method was HEAD, the entity of the response SHOULD contain a short hypertext note with a hyperlink to the new URI(s) , since many pre-HTTP/1.1 user agents do not understand the 307 status. Therefore, the note SHOULD contain the information necessary for a user to repeat the original request on the new URI. If the 307 status code is received in response to a request other than GET or HEAD, the user agent MUST NOT automatically redirect the request unless it can be confirmed by the user, since this might change the conditions under which the request was issued.
Technical SEO | | CarsProduction0 -
How do I redirect index.html to the root / ?
The site I've inherited had operated on index.html at one point, and now uses index.php for the home page, which goes to the / page. The index.html was lost in migrating server hosts. How do I redirect the index.html to the / page? I've tried different options that keep giving ending up with the same 404 error. I tried a redirect from index.html to index.php which ended in an infinite loop. Because the index.html no longer exists in the root, should I created it and then add a redirect to it? Can I avoid this by editing the .htaccess? Any help is appreciated, thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | NetPicks0 -
301 redirects
Hi Guys, Question,
Technical SEO | | VividLime
Lets say I have a page oldfile.php at position #2 then set-up a redirection in the following way 100 incoming external links--> oldfile.php [301 to] newfile.php Google comes along and updates its index to newfile.php and ranking of newfile.php remains at position #2. Everything is good. Lets say in 5months, I come along and delete oldfile.php so we have
100 incoming external links--> deleted(oldfile.php) or 100 incoming external links-->404 error. |||| newfile.php Do I then loose the rankings on newfile.php. My thinking is that now that all the external links now point to a page not found, newfile.php should loose rankings Am I correct in my assumption?0