Question about shopping carts and search engines

[concepts]

Hello,
I am shopping for a new shopping cart. I went through a lot of messages, but there are too many. can a few people answer my questions?

I am currently using Intershop. I want to switch mainly because the search engine are not indexing our cgi-bin product pages.

I dont want to make the same mistake when moving 8000+ products.

My question:

WHAT OTHER applications or URLs will search engines not index. I see a lot of ASP and ASPX tags in many shopping carts. Will search engines omit this or will they keep it?

What other tags in URLs should I avoid?

Second question:
Any shopping carts which have

1. CIC CODE INPUT on CREDIT CARD INPUT
2. Allows multiple variations of products
3. Very fast
4. Wishlist
5. Customer order progress (processing, shipping, shipped, paid)
6. Good search engine built in
7. Cross sell of products
8. Allows attributes like 'NEW PRODUCT' or "TOP 20 product"

Thanks

[lorax]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld concepts!

First, just because the bots aren't indexing your pages now doesn't mean you can't entice them to index your pages. A few tweaks to your htaccess file may be all that is required.

Second, many shopping carts have the same issues of passing var strings in the URL and you may very well run into the same problem on most of the alternatives you find.

The trick to getting your cart indexed is simply a matter of removing the vars and making sure your pages can be parsed. Use this tool [searchengineworld.com] to get a sense of what a Spider will see when it visits one of you cart's pages.

Then do some reading here on Mod-rewrite [google.com] and htaccess files.

If, by chance, you can't use mod-rewrite - it might be wise to move to a host that supports it rather than switch shopping carts.