Productcart SEO and Google supplemental r

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. 

Potential Solution for Improving search engine friendliness

    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.

Problem 2 How Review pages are handled

I have noticed that when there are not reviews available for a product there still is a page generated and indexed by google.  This page since there in very little content and almost no content that is unquie is saved as a supplemental result with a header status of 200

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.

 

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,

Maybe you could post some of the issues here and under the suggestions for new features.  I am sure many of us would appreciate it.  I have posted my robots.txt file as it applies to productcart in a new thread if you are interested.

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.

 

 

 

Thanks for your feedback. We will take this into account in the next release (v3). All storefront files will be lowercase.