NoIndex Purchase Page

[ErnieB]

We ran a ScreamingFrog report of one of our websites and found that there are thousands of instances of a single page with a different URL parameter, for example:

purchase.cfm?id=1234
purchase.cfm?id=1235
purchase.cfm?id=1236
purchase.cfm?id=1237

and we do not need purchase.cfm to be indexed for any reason as there is practically no content on that page to begin with, but it's just part of the purchase steps in our website.

What is the best way to deal with this for Google & SEO?  Should we do a Meta NoIndex of this purchase.cfm page?

Thank you.

[LesleyPaone]

In most carts they aren't an actual add to cart per se. They are link to the product that uses ajax or a query string to add the product to the cart. So basically if people enter in through that link they will have the product automatically added to their cart. I think most people see that as bad e-commerce practice. Plus it really would make it hard to do any evaluation on abandonment.

[recwarehouse]

Other than the bot-created abandoned carts, why would one not want those pages indexed? Is it because it affects bounce rate and bounce rate affects rankings? I have just discovered that we have several hundreds of our  /addtocart pages showing up in search results, so I am trying to figure out if this is a good thing or a bad thing. Any insight is appreciated.

Thanks,

Heath

[LesleyPaone]

That is exactly the correct way to do them.

I would also bet that if you are using links like you mentioned you are getting a lot of bot created abandoned carts as well. One thing I would add is a no follow to the links as well if you cannot change them to how it is mentioned above, the no follow will help with the abandoned carts.

[EGOL]

Just saying what I do.  Not saying that it is best.

Instead of making my "add to cart" buttons into  links, I have them process through a form.   I don't want to blast thousands of links into a shopping cart.