Forum Moderators: open
I need to add a shopping cart to the site to make it easier for people to buy widgets.
On the plus side, I will not have to change any extensions on the page names, but I will need to add a path argument for keeping the customer's shopping cart intact as they travel through the site. (I think the path argument would be more reliable than using cookies.)
Question is, how will this affect my search engine rankings?
Will the search engines ignore certain path arguments? In other words is the path argument in "page.html?sessionID=12345" more likely to be ignored than "page.html?cart=12345"?
This site does not currently use any path arguments for dynamic content, so the only path arguments it would have would be for customer tracking.
Any advice?
Thanks!
For the most part, session ID's are avoided by the SE's and if they do get indexed they are typically dumped soon afterwards, in my experience at least.
If you're looking more for advice on implementation of a new cart, here are a few threads:
[webmasterworld.com...]
[webmasterworld.com...]
I get the feeling that your interest is mainly in finding a SE friendly shopping cart solution?
Thanks for your reply, and the one discussion did have some useful information. Thanks!
I will be writing my own shopping cart, so my interest is more in the spidering.
Right now, I have pages that look like:
www.domain.dom/pagename.html
When I implement the shopping cart, they will look like:
www.domain.dom/pagename.html?sessionID=12345
...where "sessionID" could be any term and "12345" would be a unique number for each visitor.
(Eventually, it may look like "pagename.html?sessionID=12345&affiliateID=54321" if I add an affiliate program.)
Now, those path arguments are only going to matter if people are ordering. If the search engines drop them, they'll still see the same content.
Additionally, for all intents and purposes, the pages are static pages. Any dynamically generated content is done without the use of path arguments. The exception being the actual shopping cart page(s), which will vary with a customer's purchases, but I figure I can simply disallow indexing of the shopping cart pages in the robots.txt file to avoid any problems there.
I'm hoping that the addition of those path arguments won't affect the rankings of my current pages.
I think, if I understand Google's FAQ correctly, that if I create a spider map (with all the URLs of my pages without the path arguments), that the Google (and other bots) will use that spider map to index the pages on my site.
If Google (or another bot) sees "pagename.html" and "pagename.html?sessionID=12345" will it realize it is not duplicate content? There doesn't seem to be a specific coding to indicate that a particular page of links is a spider map, so how will the Bots differentiate between a link found on the site (with path arguments) versus a link found on the spider map (without path arguments)?
Does Google (or other bots) care whether a link is set to open in a new window or not? I'm thinking I might want the spider map to open in a new window so that customers won't lose their tracking number if they click on it by mistake.
Thanks,
Dan
I'm hoping that the addition of those path arguments won't affect the rankings of my current pages.
They will. The more variables you add the more likely it is the SEs will have trouble with it or decide not to crawl it. Use Mod Rewrite [webmasterworld.com] to mask the variables and make the pages appear as though they are static.
If Google (or another bot) sees "pagename.html" and "pagename.html?sessionID=12345" will it realize it is not duplicate content?
Good question. I'm not sure what the answer is. See above to resolve the issue.
They will. The more variables you add the more likely it is the SEs will have trouble with it or decide not to crawl it. Use Mod Rewrite to mask the variables and make the pages appear as though they are static.
Thanks for the Mod Rewrite link.
It was a nice refresher course in "Why I Stopped Using Perl and Avoided PHP Entirely." ;-)
Dan
