E-Commerce: Random Cart ID Redirects

[G2W]

Hi All,

I'm having an ecommerce cart issue. Basically, each time a purchase is made, the cart pops up with a unique id (eg www.mysite.com/cart.php?action=add&product_id=3728), This is being caught by MOZ scans as an individual page in some instances.

Could I simply add Disallow: /cart.php to my robots.txt to nix this issue? In theory it should keep all subsequent query strings from being indexed, right?

Thanks!

[LesleyPaone]

Generally you always disallow the cart page in e-commerce sites. The reason being is that some spiders like baidu, will make fake shopping carts when spidering your site. If you keep track of your abandoned cart rate, this will wreak havoc on your stats.

When you disallow the cart.php, it will keep the whole page from being indexed, which ideally is not a bad thing. More than likely the way your cart works is it uses ajax to post the product to that page silently to add it to the cart. But at the same time if you go to site.com/cart.php it will more than likely take you to the cart screen. There really is no inherit value in having that page indexed by search engines. If people are coming to that page, it will also skew your numbers when you are trying to figure why people are dropping out of the checkout process.

[CleverPhD]

I would add, you want to also no follow, noindex all links to any of your shopping cart pages.  Ideally, if you have your cart pages in a given folder, you can disallow the whole folder and take care of things as a group.

[G2W]

Thanks, Lesley. I've just added the cart page to the disallow list.

[LesleyPaone]

No problem. What platform do you use, because you can include what CleverPhD said as well, it really just depends on how the headers of the template are generated. I am not familiar with a platform that uses directories for the cart pages, but I am sure that some exist. One thing to watch out for if you try to no follow a whole directory is, some carts put all of their secured (ssl) pages in the same place. This could include the contact page, which you want to leave index able. If you are not familiar with coding in the platform, I would avoid it, because if you got the conditional code wrong, you could de-index a portion of your site accidentally.

[G2W]

I'm using Interspire's shopping cart system with a few modifications. There's absolutely no official support for it at this point, so I appreciate your help.

The cart is a standalone php page, so I think that just blocking that off should be sufficient.

Thanks!