Bots (the boring Google etc sort)

[xoggoth]

At the mo. i've got a flag set in my new shopping cart to log all visitors so I could get a clue if summit not working. Get large number of visits from Google, MSN and lesser known bots, Russia, Germany, China, Ukraine etc.

Got similar on a cart on a Wordpress site set up by somebody else and it all seems to be working correctly if I or other interested parties visit but otherwise it gets no visits at all, not even by those bots. Anyone got a clue why this might be? Cheers.

[Bunk]

The link to the cart on the Wordpress site might have rel="nofollow" on it so that search engines will ignore it. Or the cart might actually open using JavaScript which the bots won't be using so they can't visit it.

[Sockpuppet]

You could set a robots.txt to make sure they "good" bots don't index it.

[AtW]

The link to the cart on the Wordpress site might have rel="nofollow" on it so that search engines will ignore it.

rel="nofollow" was designed for user-submitted comments with links so that ranking does not pass to those sites.

Use robots.txt to disallow URLs that should not be crawled - The Web Robots Pages

You could set a robots.txt to make sure they "good" bots don't index it.

They can still index it (show in searches thanks to anchor text and URL matches), but good bots should not crawl that URL.