Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Nofollow and ecommerce cart/checkout pages
-
Hi!!
Another noob question:
Should I be nofollowing my site's cart and checkout pages? Or as SEs can't get to the checkout pages without either logging in or completing the form is it something I shouldn't worry about? Have read things saying both. Not sure which is correct.
Thank you! Appreciate the help.
Lynn
-
Thank you James!! I really appreciate the insight and your patience.
Lynn
-
yes that's all correct.
-
On my site the only things that are accessible via HTTPS are the checkout pages and the my account pages (or so I am told - still testing). So for these I could mark "noindex, nofollow" correct as don't really want Google to crawl these? And robots.txt can accomplish the same thing (robots.txt may be easier for me as requires no dev time; I can't control this tag via the CMS)?
Thanks for the input!
Lynn
-
1. yes
2. yes, robots.txt works too - there are numerous ways to have the same effect. personal preference comes into it, plus one may be easier than another in your site/CMS. The reason I use noindex is that any page on my site could be accessed by https - so I prefer to dynamically throw noindex into any page that is accessed that way.
-
Hello!
Thank you both for taking the time to answer. A follow-up question just so I understand:
1. "noindex, follow" will allow SEs to crawl a page but NOT put it in the index correct?
2. Can't I also stop SE access to certain directories/pages by putting an entry in the robots.txt? This would stop crawling AND indexing correct?
Why would one use one over the other? Just want to understand the idea behind it.
Thank you so much guys!!
Lynn
-
the safest route is to "noindex, follow" any page that is requested by https - this also squashes duplicate content when the user accesses non-cart pages using https...
-
Hey,
I'd 'noindex, nofollow' cart pages as they are no use to anyone searching and you're just going to dilute your authority through those extra pages.
DD
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
-
What do you do with product pages that are no longer used ? Delete/redirect to category/404 etc
We have a store with thousands of active items and thousands of sold items. Each product is unique so only one of each. All products are pinned and pushed online ... and then they sell and we have a product page for a sold item. All products are keyword researched and often can rank well for longtail keywords Would you :- 1. delete the page and let it 404 (we will get thousands) 2. See if the page has a decent PA, incoming links and traffic and if so redirect to a RELEVANT category page ? ~(again there will be thousands) 3. Re use the page for another product - for example a sold ruby ring gets replaces with ta new ruby ring and we use that same page /url for the new item. Gemma
Technical SEO | | acsilver0 -
Low page impressions
Hey there MOZ Geniuses; While checking my webmaster data I noticed that almost all my Google impressions are generated by the home page, most other content pages are showing virtually no impression data <50 (the home page is showing around 1500 - a couple of the pages are in the 150-200 range). the site has been up for about 8 months now. Traffic on average is about 500 visitors, but I'm seeing very little entry other then the home page. Checking the number Sitemap section 27 of 30 are index Webmaster tools are not reporting errors Webmaster keyword impressions are also extremely low 164 keywords with the highest impression count of 79 and dropping from there. MOZ is show very few minor issues although it says that it crawled 10k pages? -- we only have 30 or so. The answer seems obvious, Google is not showing my content ... the question is why and what steps can I take to analyze this? Could there be a possibility of some type of penalty? I welcome all your suggestions: The site is www.calibersi.com
Technical SEO | | VanadiumInteractive0 -
Canonical tag for Home page: with or without / at the end???
Setting up canonical tags for an old site. I really need advice on that darn backslash / at the end of the homepage URL. We have incoming links to the homepage as http://www.mysite.com (without the backslash), and as http://www.mysite.com/ (with the backslash), and as http://www.mysite.com/index.html I know that there should be 301 redirects to just one version, but I need to know more about the canonical tags... Which should the canonical tag be??? (without the backslash) or (with the backslash) Thanks for your help! 🙂
Technical SEO | | GregB1230 -
How Does Google's "index" find the location of pages in the "page directory" to return?
This is my understanding of how Google's search works, and I am unsure about one thing in specific: Google continuously crawls websites and stores each page it finds (let's call it "page directory") Google's "page directory" is a cache so it isn't the "live" version of the page Google has separate storage called "the index" which contains all the keywords searched. These keywords in "the index" point to the pages in the "page directory" that contain the same keywords. When someone searches a keyword, that keyword is accessed in the "index" and returns all relevant pages in the "page directory" These returned pages are given ranks based on the algorithm The one part I'm unsure of is how Google's "index" knows the location of relevant pages in the "page directory". The keyword entries in the "index" point to the "page directory" somehow. I'm thinking each page has a url in the "page directory", and the entries in the "index" contain these urls. Since Google's "page directory" is a cache, would the urls be the same as the live website (and would the keywords in the "index" point to these urls)? For example if webpage is found at wwww.website.com/page1, would the "page directory" store this page under that url in Google's cache? The reason I want to discuss this is to know the effects of changing a pages url by understanding how the search process works better.
Technical SEO | | reidsteven750 -
Double Slash // in URL
My client is using double forward slahes in URL like this "//" is this affecting SEO?
Technical SEO | | yanaiguana1110 -
How does Google find /feed/ at the end of all pages on my site?
Hi! In Google Webmaster Tools I find *.../feed/ as a 404 page in crawl errors. The problem is that none of these pages exist and they have no inbound links (except the start page). FYI, it´s a wordpress site. Example: www.mysite.com/subpage1/feed/ www.mysite.com/subpage2/feed/ www.mysite.com/subpage3/feed/ etc Does Google search for /feed/ by default or why do I keep getting these 404´s every day?
Technical SEO | | Vivamedia0 -
OK to block /js/ folder using robots.txt?
I know Matt Cutts suggestions we allow bots to crawl css and javascript folders (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNEipHjsEPU) But what if you have lots and lots of JS and you dont want to waste precious crawl resources? Also, as we update and improve the javascript on our site, we iterate the version number ?v=1.1... 1.2... 1.3... etc. And the legacy versions show up in Google Webmaster Tools as 404s. For example: http://www.discoverafrica.com/js/global_functions.js?v=1.1
Technical SEO | | AndreVanKets
http://www.discoverafrica.com/js/jquery.cookie.js?v=1.1
http://www.discoverafrica.com/js/global.js?v=1.2
http://www.discoverafrica.com/js/jquery.validate.min.js?v=1.1
http://www.discoverafrica.com/js/json2.js?v=1.1 Wouldn't it just be easier to prevent Googlebot from crawling the js folder altogether? Isn't that what robots.txt was made for? Just to be clear - we are NOT doing any sneaky redirects or other dodgy javascript hacks. We're just trying to power our content and UX elegantly with javascript. What do you guys say: Obey Matt? Or run the javascript gauntlet?0 -
Do I need to add canonical link tags to pages that I promote & track w/ UTM tags?
New to SEOmoz, loving it so far. I promote content on my site a lot and am diligent about using UTM tags to track conversions & attribute data properly. I was reading earlier about the use of link rel=canonical in the case of duplicate page content and can't find a conclusive answer whether or not I need to add the canonical tag to these pages. Do I need the canonical tag in this case? If so, can the canonical tag live in the HEAD section of the original / base page itself as well as any other URLs that call that content (that have UTM tags, etc)? Thank you.
Technical SEO | | askotzko1
