Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I have recently let loose on the public my first attempt at an e-commerce site, having developed/promoted several other sites with fluctuating success over the last few years.
The new site is using an off the shelf open source shopping cart and Google has been crawling the site since way before it was launched after finding the site from a link in their support forum.
I have noticed that Google is crawling pages on my site which, in theory at least, do not exist. For example, today it crawled the gift certificate page, which was turned off in admin long before Google's first visit. I have scowered the site and no links for the gift cert page appear anywhere. I have looked back at all of the Google sessions [pride won't let me delete them yet!] and can not find an instance where Google has found the pages from within the site [there are other un-used pages being crawled too].
So, I have two questions: Firstly, does Google recognise that my site is based on an "off the shelf" cart, and know that these pages exist, even without a direct link? And secondly, how do I stop these pages appearing in the SERP's? Most will have "Unprofessional" text, generated as standard by the cart program.
Many thanks in advance.
Example:
Put the following line in <head> of page:
<META name="ROBOTS" content="NOINDEX">
At least in my experience, this procedure does not restrict Google from following links on the page, which is usually a good thing.
Start at http://domain.com/ and then run it again starting at http://www.domain.com/ next time.
