category name in SEO URLs

In ProductCart v4 support for the keyword-rich URLs will be built into the system. It can be turned on and off with one click, assuming - of course - that the 404 error handler has been setup correctly in IIS (or in the Web hosting console that gives access to that server setting).

So taking advantage of this feature becomes even easier in v4. There will no longer be separate "SEO" files to upload.

That said, we do not have plans to incorporate the category name in the product details page URL as suggested above, although we understand the benefit of doing so. Our development roadmap is already too full "as is"


Edited by earlyimp - 17-July-2009 at 2:45am

I'm inclined to disagree with the idea of going ISAPI Rewrite for Brian's goal.

Relatively speaking, the amount of code one would have to alter in the SEO mod is significantly less than what I recently dealt with.

www.maximumsecurity.com was altered by a team who were hired by the client to perform SEO optimization.  I should acknowledge that the SEO team was unfamilliar with PC, and perhaps there were other ways they could have approached this, but I had to migrate all of their changes while I upgraded the store from 3.01 to 3.51, so I saw first hand what they ended up doing.  We performed this upgrade as part of the process of implementing the new design the site features.

Now I am no master of ISAPI by any means, so perhaps I or the SEO team could have found other ways to do things.  And we (Sean and I) have already have the conversation about why that team neglected to place the product name into the altered URL.  I just don't have an answer for that one, but at least I don't have to take credit for it.  (We agreed to leave what the SEO team did as-is since the client paid a small fortune for their services.)

But based on what I went through to keep this beast hanging together, I would argue long and hard against ISAPI as an alternative to EI's standard SEO mod.  There are little rule exceptions for various pages, and scripting changes that they (the SEO folks) implemented to make certain various references to images and scripts work correctly.  It took several hours to migrate those and other changes from 3.01 to 3.51, a task which goes much more quickly when upgrading an unaltered (or lightly altered) store.

In comparison, the SEO mod goes in with minimal effort, and minimal impact on the code.  Upgrades are a cinch.

Logic already exists within the SEO mod to determine the category name for the purposes of presenting the breadcrumbs.  I haven't looked at what it will take to do what you want Brian, but I would absolutely be taking a shot at that before even thinking about ISAPI. 

ISAPI has some neat things we can (and do) achieve with it, but it's going be a rare exception where I encourage anyone to use it for SEO on PC.