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Should you 'noindex' Checkout Pages?
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Today I was reviewing my Moz analytics and suddenly noticed 1,000 issues with pages without a meta description. I reviewed the list and learned it is 1,000 checkout pages. That's because my website has thousands of agency pages from which you can buy a product, and it reflects that difference on each version of the checkout.
So, I was thinking about no-indexing (but continuing to 'follow') these checkout pages, but wondering if it has any knock-on effects I may be unaware of?
Any assistance is much appreciated.
Luke
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if you are thinking about a no-indexing checkout page I think yes i think you should do a no index check out page.
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Why not exclude them from a crawler via your robots.txt so in the first place it won't hurt crawl budget?
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