Site Wide Link Situation

[RezStream8]

Hi-

We have clients who are using an e-commerce cart that sits on a separate domain that appears to be providing site wide links to our clients websites. Therefore, would you recommend disallowing the bots to crawl/index these via a robots.txt file, a no follow meta tag on the specific pages the shopping cart links are implemented on or implement no follow links on every shopping cart link? Thanks!

[BizDetox]

Rez.

You should be able to remove that sitewide link from your shopping cart. I had a similar situation with a joomla site i did that had a sitewide link situation on the product page of  JoomShopping and you can purchase to remove it. Unfortunately thats the way it is. Take a look at the help files or forums of the shopping cart site. What shopping cart is it?

If you cannot remove it, then robots.txt is the best way i would NOT do a no follow to that page. Unless you dont care about the data or care about getting ranked for those pages. But you are saying its site wide.

So i am a little confused on that.

Hope it helps.

Best Wishes,

Hampig M

BizDetox

[RezStream8]

Hi-

Thanks for the feedback!  So the robots.txt is the best way?

The shopping cart's URL does not have much authority so it's not important for us to get the link juice from the separate domain which is why we're debating how to implement a no follow. Do you see any harm in doing so?

Thanks,

Rez

[BizDetox]

Rez you gotta consider a few things.

When looked at the site structure and AI of your site you have to think about the Juice flow as a funnel. More Juice to the top distributed less juice to the bottom. So for shopping cart pages or product pages ( depending on how deep they are ), i usually incorporate Long tail , targeted keywords ( ie: Mimi Juie baby sippy cups ) where the volume is not much but its targeted enough that even with a limited juice flow you can rank.

My initial suggestion to you was to contact the person or company that built the shopping cart in order to remove the link. ( THAT IS MY FIRST OPTION ). I would not do a no follow to the product page. ( dont do anything crazy like that ) Specially if you have Share bar options for your products and reviews etc. ( you will lose all that ) .

LAST OPTION for you should be to do a robot.txt to ONLY that link, NOT the page.

Again please understand you should not DEVALUE your page like that .

Hope this helps.

Let me know how it turns out

Hampig M

BizDetox

[RezStream8]

Hi! Thanks! I completely understand. We would never want to prevent URLs on the client's domain from being crawled. That could clearly put our client's online presence at risk. However, we're more concerned with Google noticing the shopping cart's domain is pointing to every page of the client's website which could appear unnatural & potentially, put the client's site at risk. What we're hoping to achieve is preventing from Google crawling the third party URL on every page to avoid any penalization.