We continue to tinker with the VPASP Ecommerce engine, the latest issue we looked at related to the SEO capabilites and was highlighted by, in my humble opinion, the very good SEO Module you can get as a free add on for IIS.
As an aside I discovered the module will SEO analyise any web site you specify, which is great for analysing your competition!
The issue we kept reported was on the shopquestion.asp page which exists to allow customers (or potential customers) to ask a question about a specific product and is reporduced (if turned on) for every product in the database.
The page has been the same for years and is poorly put together as it has no unique title, empty meta description and no keywords. Now in the past this was not a major issue as the page was more functional rather than of benefit to the whole SEO environment but following the Google Panada Technology implementation thin pages could start to impact your site especially if they do not meet with the Google quality guide lines.
As a simple and quick temporary solution I have blocked the pages from being indexed from search engines by placing a rel=”nofollow” in the hyper link to the page to prevent indexing.
If you want to also it’s quite easy, in a text editor or WDE open shopfileio.asp, find the sub Handle_question (it was the final sub in my file) and change the line
strMessage = “<a href=””” & strURL & “””>” & GetLang(“langQuestion”) & “</a>”
to read:
strMessage = “<a href=””” & strURL & “”” rel=””nofollow””>” & GetLang(“langQuestion”) & “</a>”
Save the file and upload your revised file to your server. If you think that the pages that have already been index are causing you a issue you may want to go to Google’s webmaster central and ask for them to be de-indexed.
When we get some spare time we’ll look to improving the page design, so watch this space (but not to often ;0)
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