Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Carl, Google will be seeing the non logged in version of whatever content you provide when it crawls the site so as long as whatever that content is is consistent with your SEO aims then there is no negative impact. If you are worried about google thinking you are hiding content in some sneaky way for example - this is not an issue since google will be seeing the standard non logged in content consistently.

Thanks for the insights. Very helpful. What about the robots.txt, though? Should it stay under http://www.example.com, where crawlers can find the file?

I understand what you mean, but let me explain. For small to medium size stores, this method makes more sense. Why? 1. Easier to add rich snippet markup on pages, due to lower product count 2. Can optimize pages around main keyword, rather than hyper-specific keyword. Example: "custom t-shirt printing" would be more desirable and have more searches than "red t-shirt printing" 3. If the store has enough products or options, the store will not look thin, and also be vastly easier to navigate. 4. You will be able to spend more time optimizing around your higher level keywords. Example: "men's collared shirts" rather than "mens black collared shirts". You can include both content and meta data for the individual details. Sample meta: Yourshirtdomain.com is the number one supplier of men's collared shirts in the midwest region. 'different varaitions here' For some very large sites, they set the sub-pages to no-index and allow the leading page to get them into the store. It's all a matter of how his site is set up, as to what will work best for him and his client.

Hi so I'm assuming your on IIS (I'm no expert on ISS I think you will need to configure the web.config) and I'm just going to step back now and get my coat as I only have experience with Apache