VirtueMart Forum

VirtueMart 2 + 3 + 4 => General Questions => Topic started by: jdunderhill on March 01, 2015, 19:36:43 PM

Title: How do I disable the "Ask a question" form (Google is indexing for all products)
Post by: jdunderhill on March 01, 2015, 19:36:43 PM
Hi

I am really strugling with disabling the "Ask a question" form, I am using VM2 as catalogue only

I have removed the ask a question button\link from the productdetails default.php flypage as far as I can see but for any of the products if you add the following to end the of the URL it will show the "ask a question" form: /askquestion?tmpl=component

It is a new site that I have just launched and I have noticed that google is indexing Ask a question pages for every product

Wondered if the Ask a question form can be disabled altogether? - This is so that I don't receive spam in the future and google doesn't index ask a question pages for every product?

I have tried the forums and can see solutions for VM1 but no luck for VM2 yet

Regards,

Jamie
Title: Re: How do I disable the "Ask a question" form (Google is indexing for all products)
Post by: GJC Web Design on March 01, 2015, 23:12:05 PM
Disallow: /askquestion  in your robots.txt?

check in your Google webmasters robots.txt checker to test
Title: Re: How do I disable the "Ask a question" form (Google is indexing for all products)
Post by: jdunderhill on March 02, 2015, 14:00:56 PM
Hi

Cheers for the suggestion I have blocked the URL in robots.txt using the below wildcard so that it blocks anything including "/askquestion?tmpl=component" from being indexed:

Disallow: */askquestion?tmpl=component

That seems to work all ok from multiple URLs so that is great

Is there an easy way of stopping the ask a question form from being generated altogether? Just thinking that further down line the spammers could append /askquestion?tmpl=component to any of my products and could autofill out the forms or and it would generate Spam

Cheers,

Jamie


Title: Re: How do I disable the "Ask a question" form (Google is indexing for all products)
Post by: jenkinhill on March 02, 2015, 14:58:20 PM
Enabling recaptcha for the ask question form is the simplest way to prevent bot spam at the moment.
Title: Re: How do I disable the "Ask a question" form (Google is indexing for all products)
Post by: jdunderhill on March 02, 2015, 20:18:59 PM
Hi

Thanks very much for the help  :D

I will add a recaptcha step to the ask a question page

Cheers,

Jamie