Many single item carts created

-- url of the page with the problem -- : midwestmeats.com.au
-- HikaShop version -- : 3.1.1
-- Joomla version -- : 3.7.5
-- PHP version -- : 5.6.31

We have just upgraded to Joomla 3.7.5 and HikaShop 3.1.1.

Since the upgrade we noticed that there were hundreds of carts with just one item in each. We deleted them but 24 hours later there are now more than 100.

The Time Stamps are all very close so it looks like they may be machine generated rather than human (unusual for us to have that many customers all at once!).

Could it be a spambot or is it something to do with Google crawling the site?

Is it something in the configuration that we can change?

Hi,

It's indeed probably just google or some other search engine indexing the add to cart links on your website.
Your add to cart links are like that:
/category-display/product/updatecart/add-1/cid-XXX
where XXX is the id of the product
So what you can do is add the folder /category-display/product/updatecart/add-1/ to not allow its indexing in your robots.txt
tools.seobook.com/robots-txt/
That should help avoid that.

Further to your advice I added the following entries to the robots.txt

Disallow: /category-display/product/updatecart/add-1/
Disallow: /hikashop-menu-for-products-listing/product/updatecart/add-1/

However I am still getting a lot of single item carts generated.

Can you please suggest any other URLs that should be disallowed or if there is any other reason that could cause these carts.

Time stamps are all very close together suggesting a bot of some sort.

Thanks for your help
Brett

Hi,

I think you should target it better...
This should do the trick.

Disallow: /*updatecart/add*

Kind Regards

Thanks for your help.

I will try that.

Regards
Brett

Hi, just wondering (since I seem to have the same problem since a couple of days) did this solve the problem?

Hi,

It does work for sure. Just try it.

Thanks

Hi there,

I did, but new carts kept coming in still the same. I understand it may take some while before the search engines process this right?

Hi,

Well yes. What you could try is manually submit robot file to google via webmasters tool and let them know about it. This should speed up if that is the case...Then just wait for a week and see how it goes.

Kind Regards

Another thing you should also check that you have rel="nofollow" attribute in your add to cart buttons.

Thanks