E-Commerce and "action=add&id123=" Links

[wmrobwl]

For the past 4 or 5 years we have been running a static (strictly html) web site with no funky symbols in the URL strings. We have enjoyed decent SERPS and rankings during this time. We have finally developed the e-commerce shopping cart of our dreams.

We are going to link the new custom built shopping cart to our current web site, leaving all of its current content, but just adding links to checkout and add to the cart. I am a little worried about implementing this because the URL string when you add something or checkout in the shopping cart contains "action=add&id123=".

I dont care if the SE's crawl the shopping cart, in fact I wouldnt even want them to. The problem is that I cant change the robots.txt page because there will be too many pages to list. Also the shopping cart resides on a different domain name. For example, if our web site was domain.com, our e-commerce website is secure-domain.com.

I am totally stumped, but there must be a way to stop the SE's from crawling this shopping cart.

I know I could use <meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow">, but I heard that currently only few robots support this tag. Is this true?

I also have the alternate option of putting this javascript code into the header of each page with products on it:

<script language="JavaScript">
function cart(action) {
window.open('https://secure-exoticracing.com/exotic/cart.lasso','cart','status=yes,menubar=no,scrollba rs=yes,resizable=yes,width=720,height=600');
return false;
}
</script>

If I use the java script, I understand that robots cant crawl java links, but what happens to the robot....does he just stop crawling the site when he hits the java, or does he just ignore it and continue crawling the site?

Any help will be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

[speed]

If that action code is going in a standard link then Google and others will try and buy everything in your shop, as will ANY browser extension that prefetches pages for the visitor to speed their browsing.

The way we do it with our shops is to use a form POST to place items in the cart, as bots can't POST they don't try buying items, but we let them index the cart page if they want to. You're welcome to have a look at http://www.cut4cloth.co.uk

With the JavaScript method it might stop bots but it will also stop people who have JavaScript off, also if you force the user to have JavaScript to shop you are now non compliant with WAI guidelines.

[sms123]

Our site uses standard "nothing fancy" static pages in conjuction with URL strings for placing items in the basket and have not seen any of the prefetch or crawling issues mentioned. I will admit that it may be happening, but I have not seen any complications or undesired effects or ranking penalties.

Our search ranking is fairly high with most of the engines for our key products (usually on the first page for the terms we focus on) so I would not worry and instead take a wait and see approach.

Good luck.

[arpecop]

I wouldn't recomend you to use javascript ... SE bots don't like it. the advice I can give you is to use simple rewrite rule in htaccess and make links to point - nofollowdir/yourid=some1234-numberwhateveryouwant:)
and put nofollow rule in robots.txt

User-agent: ia_archiver
Disallow: /
User-agent: *
Disallow: /nofollowdir/*?
Disallow: /nofollowdir/?

hope understanding
best regards and excuse my bad - content="en-us" writing :)

I definitely think switching method = "GET" to method = "POST" in your form would solve the problem, because unlike GET, POST does not put the form data in the URL. -SD