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Should I NOFOLLOW my "Add To Cart" buttons?
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Hello and Merry Christmass
Should I NOFOLLOW my "Add To Cart" buttons?
My e-commerce site has hundreds of products. Content wise, there is no real value to the reader on that page (besides for some testimonials and "why here" sentences). So it is not a page you'd want / expect to find in the SERPs.
Also, with hundreds of links pointing to this page it would be "stronger" than other important pages which doesn't make sense.
Last but not least, if I have limited time that the bots are on my site, why keep sending them to a non important page.
This is why I am leaning to nofollowing the "add to cart" buttons and looking for reinforcements.
Thanks
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I would definitely recommend to keep your shopping cart out of the SERPs. I would not recommend to use nofollow to try to achieve this goal. In a recent video Google's head of webspam, Matt Cutts, explains why using nofollow only really works for external links. It is probably best to no-index shopping cart page your in robot.txt or in the HTML of the page itself.
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I run my buttons through forms. Thus no links and no "product pages" generated by the shopping cart.
This enables me to produce most of my sales from minor category pages with multiple products or multiple varieties of single products. I believe that these single pages compete better in the search engines that four or more separate pages. I also believe that they result in more items being added to the cart - because the customer sees the variety.
Eliminating all of those product pages gives me a much smaller and more compact site that I believe competes better in the SERPs. It also enables me to produce custom product pages that are not possible through the cart's product page template. They can be optimized like finely crafted arrows instead of being made by a cookie cutter program.
If you don't know how to produce form code, ask your cart provider for help. My code looks something like this.
<form action="https://secure.example.com/cgi-bin/addtocart?MERCHANTID=EGOL&ADD=id-tool-225" method="post"><input type="<a class="attribute-value">image</a>" src="/add-to-cart.gif" width="<a class="attribute-value">105</a>" height="<a class="attribute-value">35</a>" border="<a class="attribute-value">0</a>" align="<a class="attribute-value">middle</a>"></form>
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