I currently maintain the backend php code for a website which allows our sales representatives to sell products and services. If a sales representative is active, he/she is given a "custom" website URL which essentially tags any activity on that particular site to that representative. Sales are only collected on representative websites (we do this to 'protect' our employees and make sure they feel we are not selling behind their back on an open parent site).
For example:
www.site.com may highlight all the products and services available but does not give a customer the ability to purchase
www.site.com/SOMEREPCODE where SOMEREPCODE is a unique identifier to a specific agent, presents the same options but opens the ability to sell that product. There are thousands of these sales representatives, therefore thousands of links pointing to the same page and content.
There has been a lot of debate as to whether we should open the site up to front end sales as well recently. Our industry is very specific so we are not too worried about lost sales from web shoppers but I do believe they exist. Some of our front end developers have "noindex, nofollow" code on the pages and we are told this is to prevent Google and others from 'blacklisting' the site as trying to have multiple links all going to the same content (think SOMEREPCODE representing over 1000 sales representatives with nearly the exact same page minus name and contact number shown).
edit - showing htaccess file
#if file or directory do not exist, try as an repid
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.php !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^([0-9a-zA-Z-]+)$ index?Rep=$1 [QSA,NC,L]
The htaccess logic above checks to make sure the code entered is not an existing file or directory. If it is not, the SOMEREPCODE is stored as a variable to index?Rep=SOMEREPCODE.
At the top of my index page, I include a function to then check if the value of Rep is a valid sales representative and if they are active. If invalid or not active, the page is redirected to a landing page giving an error. If the rep is active and exists, the page continues to load after setting the appropriate SESSION variables.
indexInclude
<?php
if(isset($_GET['Rep']) && $_GET['Rep'] != NULL) {
//DB connectors called
$sql = "SELECT * FROM reps WHERE repcode = ? AND status = 'Active' LIMIT 1";
$stmt = $db->prepare($sql);
$stmt->execute(array($_GET['Rep']));
while ($row = $stmt->fetch()) {
$_SESSION['repname'] = $row['repname'];
//collect other rep information
}
if( !isset($_SESSION['repname']) && empty($_SESSION['repname']) ) {
header("Location: unavailable");
exit;
} else {
$_SESSION['sales'] = "Y";
}
} elseif( !isset($_SESSION['sales']) && !isset($_GET['Rep']) ) {
$_SESSION['sales'] = "N";
}
?>
The index page does not change at all in this case, only areas of the site that 'display' in the presence of $_SESSION['open'] == 'Y'.
Is this in fact true? Are there ways to handle this situation which would allow us to open the site up for web sales as well?
if it's not complete mirror, than it's not a big issue.
best practice would be
www.site.com/SOMEREPCODE -> set a selling cookie -> HTTP 301 redirect -> www.site.com
basically all /SOMEREPCODE redirects to an canonical version of the URL, only the canonical version of the URL gets communicated to google. if you can't do an HTTP 301 redirect, try the canonical element http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394
with the canonical element the flow would look like this
www.site.com/SOMEREPCODE -> set a selling cookie -> HTTP 200 (deliver the page content) -> page has
<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.site.com/"/>in the HEAD sectionget rid of the
"nofollow"it does not make sense and devalues all links that point from these pages to other pages. if you use an HTTP 301 redirect (or the canonical element) thenoindexis unnecessary (but doesn't hurt).but as a matter of fact: if you do not know how much of sales pot. your are missing and are not sure how to handle that situation (+ obviously you have devs who do not understand SEO but think they do because they use
"nofolow"and talk about 'blacklisting') you should think about consulting a serious SEO. any good SEO can give you good enough answers to all of these questions.