Huge Duplicate Content Problem -- if I move to Zen Cart will that stop?

I am presently designing my Zen Cart store and will convert to it as soon as possible. However, my store is presently a commercially available store with shopping cart (won't say who) that has huge duplicate content problems. All my pages are indexed by Google twice, once with http and once with https. I believe that the floodgates were opened to this issue by an affiliate who linked back with the https.

We have lost a lot of sales because our Google SERPs fell out of sight, but the provider won't do anything to block Google from indexing the https pages.

When we switch to Zen Cart, will we have the ability to block the https indexing?.....and, how?

I will appreciate any and all assistance.

Zen Cart handles this by only securing checkout pages. I suggest you finish your new cart, but in the new and the old use you robots.txt to block the crawling of https pages.

There are some other more complicated ways to attack this if you have a programmer/developer around you can grab the search engines, Google for example and redirect to the non ssl likeness of the pages.

This is a tough issue all around to beat as you cannot just ask Google in webmasters tools to remove them once blocked... You have no choice of http https in the removal tool.

~Melanie

mprough:

Zen Cart handles this by only securing checkout pages. I suggest you finish your new cart, but in the new and the old use you robots.txt to block the crawling of https pages.

There are some other more complicated ways to attack this if you have a programmer/developer around you can grab the search engines, Google for example and redirect to the non ssl likeness of the pages.

This is a tough issue all around to beat as you cannot just ask Google in webmasters tools to remove them once blocked... You have no choice of http https in the removal tool.

~Melanie
Thanks Melanie.....I noticed the lack of choice of http/https in the Google removal tool.
I think the root files for http and https are completely separate entities and robots.txt files have to be made for both....which may also require modification of the .htaccess........about which I know nothing.

Correct, here is what Google says http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35302

The issue is that most hosting doesn't allow for this procedure, which is why we have in the past used Google's user agent to redirect the bot to a non secured page via htaccess or config.

Also, just in case, make certain you haven't included secured pages in your sitemap if you have one.

We have also used robots.txt wildcards to accomplish this with some fair results http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=40367

So something like...

Disallow: https

We have not however, done this is a year or so in robots.txt... Additionally, blocking in robots.txt does not prevent indexing... only crawling.

Once you get your zen cart going I have something that will help. I actually used this to get a JS script I wanted into all page, BUT SSL pages. You could easily tweak the directive for inclusion in ONLY SSL page and throw a noindex, nofollow tag in there.. That would certainly do the trick.

http://pro-webs.net/store/index.php?main_page=document_product_info&cPath=30&products_id=90

~Melanie