Nofollow and ecommerce cart/checkout pages

[hiphound]

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

[krissy-cca]

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

[TellThemEverything]

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...

[hiphound]

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

[TellThemEverything]

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.

[hiphound]

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

[TellThemEverything]

yes that's all correct.

[hiphound]

Thank you James!! I really appreciate the insight and your patience.

Lynn