ISAPI Rewrite

I installed the EI Seo mods and they were easy to install (just like Greg said) and have worked flawlessly since then (jan 2, 2009)  Whether they increased by SERP is hard to know, as I have kept chipping away at on-site and off-site SEO things, so our pages are getting higher on Google.
So good job to EI on this one and thanks Greg for telling me how easy it was to put in.

About 2 years ago I spent a lot of time rewriting Product Cart to work with Helicon ISAPI rewrite. I knew nothing about regular expressions so the learning curve was difficult and very time consuming. I also had to reprogram a lot of the code in Product Cart to get it to work correctly which took a lot more time.

Now my url's are very clean and I have a lot of control on them. One of the reasons I had to do this was that the URL structure of my old site was different than that of Product Cart. So to not loose my SEO ranking I modified the Product Cart URL's to match the old site. Since I moved 3 sites to Product Cart I needed something flexible since the URL's were different with each site.

While I probably spent well over 40 hours doing this it was probably worth it considering the flexibility I have now. The project included writing special functions to handle displaying the new URL format, changing every link on the site to show the new URL structure, modifying the administrative pages to allow complete customization of the url format and new custom fields for needed SEO information.

Many people have asked me for this code but it is so integrated into all my other site changes it would take a while to sort it all out to give it to someone. I might could pull some of the regular expressions I created to share. Maybe this will give you some idea as to what is involved.

I should add that I have a client who also owns a Volusion store - and just when we were preparing to install the PC SEO mod, he asked me to hold off because he found that his PC store was ranking and climbing just fine, without the mod, and better than his Volusion store ever did.  

Edited by Greg Dinger - 30-December-2008 at 12:48pm

Since the PC SEO mod is reliant upon the description (product name) you can set keyword density in whatever way you wish.  Sure, with ISAPI  you may be able to control page names that differ from the product name, and perhaps that gives you greater flexibility, but I would want to hear from store owners who use ISAPI to learn if they had some strong opinion based on comparing the two approaches.  Regardless, ease of implementation of the PC mod versus ISAPI - as stated above - is going to be significant.  ISAPI is a royal pain.

Greg - Ease of implementation is a valid criteria - provide the solution works in the first place.  The PC SEO mod does a fine job of giving nice looking URL strings.  But does that increase SE placement?  Does the ProductCart system have a major flaw wrt URL search engine optimizing (SEO)? One of the major requirements for a site to index and list well on search engines is keyword URL density.  When I comes to ProductCart’s SEO solutions, I really don’t know if it would improve this and even if it did I really don’t know what the performance impact might be. A custom 404 page error is not intended to be used in this way. Additionally, search engines usually see a 404 error as a page that no longer exists, so it may have a counter productive impact on our site.  On the other hand, the iSAPI solution works with the ProductCart system as URL re-writes. This will result in higher SE placement.  But, from what I can tell, this type of implementation requires a great deal of customization to the ProductCart system. So, when I said the ISAPI rewrite is the way to go, I meant in providing tangible results - not which is easier...