Expired carts again

[Mike Hughes]

Thanks Dave. I had sussed this. See post #8 in this thread.

Mike

[Mike Hughes]

Ok. Here's what is happening on my site and why.

I did have links to the checkout using the ! after action=start which were included in my templates for an earlier version of actinic. Having checked it out, these links work fine if the visitor has a cart/session cookie anyway so any customrs looking to checkout wouldn't have had a problem. I removed the ! from these links back in mid January, but have still been seeing the error occur in my logs.

Having searched through my access logs in detail I can now say that the problem I'm having is that the search engines picked up the links and doing their usual stuff had been, and still are, getting the page to look at it. As they don't have any actinic cookie they're getting the error page rather than the 'cart is empty' page. This isn't a real problem though as the scripts are returning a 200 (OK) message with the error text.

This explains why my error log is full of these messages and why they haven't been timing up with any customer orders. For some reason msnbot is particularly keen to see the page, sometimes asking for it up to 4 times a day.

I assume that over time the SEs will realise that it's no longer linked to and drop it from their searches. This could take 6 months or more, so if actinic could find a workaround like using a default 'action=start' or working out why the error page is only returned when there's no cookie then it would save me a bunch of space in my error logs.

Mike