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I have an e-commerce website that reuses a snippet to render products on the category, search and cart pages (for the upsell area, and not the actual cart contents). The snippet uses the schema.org markup, and because it lets people interact with a product and buy it right away, I mark it up as Offer, not an ItemList or similar.

The issue is with the cart page, which is where I don't want the schema.org markup to appear. The first thing coming to mind is to have the snippet stop applying any markup when it recognises the cart page, but that will introduce lots of if-elses, and complicate the code.

If I wrap the products block into a <noindex></noindex> from the parent cart template, will that have any effect on these products appearing on other pages? They use the same sku and url values everywhere. Or am I better off adding noindex to the whole cart page?

My concern is this may send conflicting signals, and it generally feels wrong, similar to putting a heater into a freezer.

ᴍᴇʜᴏᴠ
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  • There is no such thing as <noindex></noindex> tags. noindex is a meta tag that goes in the head of the page and prevents the entire page from getting indexed. It is hard to make search engines ignore part of a page. See Preventing robots from crawling specific part of a page – Stephen Ostermiller Mar 17 '21 at 09:32
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    What is wrong with the schema appearing on the shopping cart page? It isn't necessary there, but search engines shouldn't be crawling shopping cart content anyway. – Stephen Ostermiller Mar 17 '21 at 09:33
  • Hi @StephenOstermiller. They do though, at least I'm seeing the cart page in the Search Console products list, it indexes and recognises the products listed there. Maybe you're right and I should noindex the whole cart page anyway – ᴍᴇʜᴏᴠ Mar 17 '21 at 14:57
  • Interesting if GSC is showing product structured data on a cart page.Indicates it is adding products to a cart and then viewing it. Not something Googlebot should be able to do as it does not keep cookies. They do have a secret shopper helping the merchant centre but I doubt that is connected to real Googlebot crawling. Is it possible to create a cart page url that also adds a product to the cart? – Tony McCreath Mar 17 '21 at 20:54
  • @TonyMcCreath I apologise about the confusion, I should have clarified right away I'm talking about the upsell and not the actual cart contents. So widespread these days that I took it for granted. I have edited the question – ᴍᴇʜᴏᴠ Mar 18 '21 at 07:09
  • Ah, so an empty cart would still have markup. I think the best solution is to noindex it. – Tony McCreath Mar 19 '21 at 09:42

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