I have been researching the impact of supplemental results and their causes in google.

I have a large number of supplement results. Some of these are due to the way Google and product cart interact.

2  problems

    How the cart handles moved, deleted, inactive product pages

    How the cart handles pages without reviews

The  1st Problem

After a page  has been indexed in Google, then the product is moved to a different category or made inactive or deleted, searches that pull up the url with the category=xxx&product id=xxx Google attemps to fetch the page based the original indexing but brings up a page that has a message: item no longer exists. 

Why is that a Problem?

The problem with that is when Google revisits the url, it receives a page with the header and footer information and the short message, item no longer exists, and is served a 302 header status.  To Google that indicates that the page exists, but has temporarily moved. It continues to used the cached version of the page for its search results.  (one I checked was from July 2005) It is apparent that google is assigning and retaining those pages in its supplement index vs the main index.

Over time in a website that changes on a regular basis, a lot of pages accumulate that are not meanful in google index of the site.  While it is not known for sure, as the inner working of googles engine is a matter of speculation, this appears to dilute the importance of the site as a whole in googles search engine results. 

    Serving up an http status of 302 does not seem to be the correct usage.  It tells the search engine that they got a good url, (not really true in this case) that has just temporarily been relocated.  When the item does not exist should be changed so that a 404 or 301 status is served instead through an asp script. With a 302 status the search engines will continue to visit and send traffic to that page. A 404 would be relatively easy Ideally, a 301 redirect to an existing related category would be best. This "should" allow the pages and product references to eventually dropout of the index. I am not sure if a 302 or a 404 would be best if they were the only choice over the long run.

Any thoughts or suggestions?  Is anyone else noticing this?  do a search using keywordxx site:www.mydomain.com to see what I mean.

www.ultimatewatermassage.com/ProductCart/pc/prv_allreviews.asp?IDProduct=785&IDCategory=51

Any thoughts or suggestions?  Is anyone else noticing this?  do a search using keywordxx site:www.mydomain.com to see what I mean.

Watercrazed

Not only have I noticed those problems, but I have found many others that require you to not only have a good overall understand of SEO, but also the ability to modify ProductCart to eliminate some of the potential pitfalls. An example of this is that you category pages should never use the url that includes the Category and Product number identifers in the query string paramters because if you move a product from one category to another, Google will retained the cached data for the old url and then it will index the new url for where the product is now and then you will end up with Google thinking that you have two unique urls for the same content.........and Bam, you just got filtered for duplicate content.

Another thing that we have noticed because we have used ISAPI Rewrite to rewrite the ProductCart url to make them look static is that if you are doing this after your ProductCart Website have been on line for a while, you need to make sure you close the door on the old urls that contain the query string parameters because otherwise you will end up with a load of pages getting filtered for duplicate content.

And then there is the Uppercase vs Lowercase problem. This is unique to running on a windows platform. The problem is that in Unix, urls with uppercase letters and urls with lowercase letters are handled as unique urls. However in Windows, urls with uppercase letters and url with lowercase letters are considered and handled as the exact same url, thus "ProductCart/PC/whatever.asp" and "productcart/pc/whatever.asp" are the same and resolve to the same page.

As you can tell, I have spent alotof time analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of Productcart and Search Engine Optimization....I only wish I knew then what I know now cause along the way my first site I used productcart on is so trashed it may be beyond hope. 

However, not alot of this is really Early Impact's fault. Some things are, but the majority of it is because Google will never really remove any url it indexes, It will hide them if you ask, you can serve them a 404 and the page will move to a supplemental result, but unfortuantely you just can't seem to get Google to drop pages from the index ever.

The biggest thing was not leaving any file unchanged. This meant looking at every file that generates a page and has links to other files.  This means that on category pages, you have to make sure you redo the links for when you have multiple pages. And all the location reference links, i.e. category--->subcategory---> at the top, you have to make sure you catch all of them. Don't forget about best sellers, featured products, new arrivals and special either. If there is a chance you will chance from vertical to horizantial layout without remembering that product cart will use a different viewcart_X.asp, you best change the url reference in all those files right now.

If your using the affiliate portion, don't forget to change how productcart generates those links. Using the sitemap builder, don't forget that. Using the Google sitemaps feature, don't forget to change that one.

And to make sure you don't torpedo yourself in the process, do it all in a development enviroment. If that development enviroment is online, be sure to block the search engines from your development area.

Watercrazed, I would go the url rewrite route on any new domain and it was certainly a great way to go when I was having trouble getting google to index my dynamic urls. Currently though, I would only recommend it for an existing productcart ecom site if you are having trouble getting your urls indexed.