Info about order.cgi function and frequency sought

[MServitus]

I have been having slow performance problems with my site
(verio FreeBSD 4.7 with Shopsite 9.0.3.1)
In researching this I have found a curious situation.
In examining a report showing my "most visited pages", I find that my
2nd most popular page is ... sc/order.cgi
the actual list looks like :

# visit Page
445 www.evolvefish.com/fish/emblems.html
438 www.evolvefish.com/office/sc/order.cgi
383 www.evolvefish.com/fish/stickers.html
317 www.evolvefish.com/fish/shirts.html

I'm sure that less than 10 % of my visitors ever start to place an order. Most just look around and then leave.

My limited question is , when is order.cgi actually accessed...??

1. when the order is first created ( ie first product added to cart)
2. Or each time shopping cart is accessed?
3. Or when order is completed.?
4. All of the above.
5. Or some other time

Are there any likely performance problems with this much actvity going to order.cgi??

Thanks for your input.

[loren_d_c]

All 'add to cart' and 'view cart' buttons go to order.cgi, and each time a shopper recalculates the shopping cart it probably counts as another hit. So I don't think this is unusual, since basically all of your multiple store pages include links to the same order.cgi, which is why it would appear to be more 'popular' than many individual store pages.

One thing to check on, do you have a robots.txt file in your site's main directory? And if so, does it contain a line like:

Disallow: /office/sc/

If not, you may want to consider adding this, it tells search engine spiders not to follow your order button links, which can save you some on bandwidth and also can keep your shopping cart screen out of your search engine results (you would probably rather have your search engine results go to your store pages instead, right?).

-Loren

[MServitus]

Thanks for the information. I DO have a Disallow: \sc\order.cgi line in my robots.txt file.
I'll continue looking elsewhere for grimlins..

[loren_d_c]

If you have:

Disallow: \sc\order.cgi

Then this is probably not having the effect you are looking for. Since your order.cgi is in office/sc/ it should probably be:

Disallow: /office/sc/order.cgi

Note the forward slashes instead of the backslashes as well. Also, robots.txt generally will only work in your main HTML directory, so if the robots.txt is inside the 'office' directory itself it is probably not being looked at by spiders at all.

Here is a site with more info on the robots.txt standard for web 'spiders':

http://www.robotstxt.org/robotstxt.html

-Loren