ISAPI Rewrite
Printed From: ProductCart E-Commerce Solutions
Category: ProductCart
Forum Name: Search Engine Optimization
Forum Description: Talk about ways to optimize your ProductCart store for search engines
URL: https://forum.productcart.com/forum_posts.asp?TID=1128
Printed Date: 28-April-2024 at 5:33pm
Software Version: Web Wiz Forums 12.04 - http://www.webwizforums.com
Topic: ISAPI Rewrite
Posted By: Jackalope
Subject: ISAPI Rewrite
Date Posted: 27-September-2007 at 12:53pm
| I'm considering adding the ISAPI Rewrite program to our site and was looking to get feedback on it's usefulness when combined with PC. I want our site to be as search engine friendly as possible and this seems be the easiest way. Thanks in advance for you feedback. |
Replies:
Posted By: Stuck
Date Posted: 27-September-2007 at 1:14pm
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The SEO Mods for ProductCart (making all URL's static) seem to have made a significant improvement in our sites ranking! Our site ranks in the top 1-5 on Google for every important keyword phrase in our industry, so we are happy campers! I can't give you any hardcore data as to exactly how beneficial this was, but no doubt it was a benefit to our seo rankings. I also fealt that the PC SEO update was a rather painless process for the most part. |
Posted By: Jackalope
Date Posted: 27-September-2007 at 1:58pm
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Stuck, So you are very happy about implimenting ISAPI Rewrite into your site? That is good to hear. How long did it take you to impliment it into PC? Thanks again. |
Posted By: Stuck
Date Posted: 27-September-2007 at 2:25pm
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I don't remember exactly, however, I would say that I was able to update two of our sites with ProductCarts SEO Mod & was back up & running in less than two hours total (uploading files, fixing whatever screwups I made, etc.) Like I say, it was quite painless overall. Here is the information & files needed: Uploaded files compatible with ProductCart v3.1 ProductCart v3.1: http://www.earlyimpact.com/forum/uploaded_files/earlyimp/2007-09-09_154357_pcSEO_v3.1_090907.zip - 2007-09-09_154357_pcSEO_v3.1_090907.zip (09.09.07) |
Posted By: Jackalope
Date Posted: 27-September-2007 at 2:38pm
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Stuck, Thanks for that link. I'm out of the office at the moment but will give it a try when I return. Thanks again for you help. I appreciate it. |
Posted By: Stuck
Date Posted: 27-September-2007 at 2:52pm
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No problem, glad to help when i can Jackalope.
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Posted By: Greg Dinger
Date Posted: 05-October-2007 at 3:19pm
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I am also interested in knowing if anyone has gone down the path of implementing ISAPI rewrite. Regardless of the mod that EI has developed, I'm curious about what strategies are working or otherwise. |
Posted By: whizzinpc
Date Posted: 03-December-2007 at 3:11pm
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We are using isapi rewrite for all our category urls... the products remained asp.... Weve been using it for a few years now with no problems... Here is what one of the isapi rules looks like RewriteRule /business_card_holders\.html /productcart/pc/viewcategories.asp\?idcategory=7 |
Posted By: slinc
Date Posted: 04-December-2007 at 7:27pm
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We have done an extensive modification to Product Cart to give us nice clean URL's using Helicon Tech ISAPI Rewrite. We completely rewrite our Category, Product and Content pages. I know hardly nothing about ISAPI Rewrite but Helicon's support is very good and they will basically write the needed code for you. It is then up to you to modify Product Cart to read the new URL's. We simply created a function that converted the new URL's to something Product Cart could read. Then created another function to rewrite the URL's links shown by Product Cart. This makes it very search engine friendly. Also makes it easy to later move to another technology like .net since our URL's are technology independent. This would be a very good, and fairly easy, add-on for Product Cart to make as part of their base system. Much more flexible than outputing static HTML pages. The performance is great. Example URL's we use::: http://www.domain.com/category/categoryname - www.domain.com/category/categoryname Hope this helps. |
Posted By: Lomito
Date Posted: 29-September-2008 at 7:29pm
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Hi Slinc,
Sounds like a beautiful solution. But should we re-invent the wheel? :-) Or would you be interested in selling/licensing the functions you developed along with some instructions? Thank you. L |
Posted By: avalight
Date Posted: 30-December-2008 at 1:52am
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Has anyone put together a simple starting instructions for the isapi rewrite? A brief overview? From what I can tell, the ISAPI rewrite is the way to go on this. -------------  Curt
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Posted By: Greg Dinger
Date Posted: 30-December-2008 at 3:00am
avalight wrote:Posted By: avalight
Date Posted: 30-December-2008 at 11:58am
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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... ------------- Curt
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Posted By: Stuck
Date Posted: 30-December-2008 at 12:17pm
The ProductCart seo url add-on does indeed work out of the box with no negative effects! We have been using this mod on two sites for approx a year now and are consistently ranked in the top 5 (as well as a few number one listings) on Google for the absolute most popular keyword combinations in our industry. 
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Posted By: Greg Dinger
Date Posted: 30-December-2008 at 12:33pm
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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.
I have one client who uses ISAPI for SEO but I'm not convinced the page names they ended up with are better than what the PC SEO mod does. And my use of ISAPI is typically to map old site pages to new PC stores so they don't lose their legacy placement.
------------- GreyBeard Design Group Certified ProductCart Developer Web Design/Development/Hosting http://tinyurl.com/5c8t4t" rel="nofollow - Add-Ons & Custom Code | |
Posted By: ProductCart
Date Posted: 30-December-2008 at 12:40pm
Please read our documentation. ProductCart - of course - does not return a 404 code when the system detects a correct product or category ID, but rather the correct, "success" code (200). There is no difference conceptually between ANY of the URL rewrite techniques. In ALL cases, the page described in the URL does not exist as a physical file/location on the Web server, but you create ways to interpret those URLs and successfully deliver the corresponding page because they are friendlier than a series of querystrings (to site visitors, not just to search engines). ------------- The ProductCart Team Home of ProductCart http://www.productcart.com" rel="nofollow - shopping cart software |
Posted By: Greg Dinger
Date Posted: 30-December-2008 at 12:47pm
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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.
So I would not assume that even the SEO mod is absolutely necessary to gain strong placement. ------------- GreyBeard Design Group Certified ProductCart Developer Web Design/Development/Hosting http://tinyurl.com/5c8t4t" rel="nofollow - Add-Ons & Custom Code | |
Posted By: avalight
Date Posted: 30-December-2008 at 2:24pm
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Well, that is interesting...If the PC Admin page for products was set up more like Volusion, it would make it a lot easier for me to modify my product descriptions and that is what would really help SE placement. But that is on another posting thread. -----I will take another look at this PC SEO re-write and see if I can do it in the 20 or 30 minutes, per Greg. 
------------- Curt
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Posted By: slinc
Date Posted: 30-December-2008 at 2:40pm
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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. |
Posted By: Guests
Date Posted: 28-April-2009 at 12:47am
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Chiming in on the "bounce off custom 404" method vs. the ISAPI Rewrite method of rewriting URLs question here. I've noticed several threads on this, but chose this one to respond to.
After eight years of experience using the "bounce off custom 404" method with excellent success and a few years experience working with ISAPI Rewrite for all manner of things, I can't find any evidence that one method or the other is more advantageous for SERPs.
What I do find is that, while it could be possible to write routines to dyamically rewrite the rules for your ISAPI rewrite each time a product or category is added or edited, it is tremendously more work to go the ISAPI rewrite way.
That is, the ISAPI rewrite method is much more difficult to dial in (face it, regex is challenging for the best of us), requires more custom modifications to source code, which in turn makes upgrades more difficult, and is therefore more time/cost prohibitive. For what advantage really?
Using the "bounce off 404" method EI provides is much more efficient vis a vis the concerns I've just raised.
I simply cannot see an advantage in this context that ISAPI Rewrite would have over the EI method, but I can see several advantages the later has over the former.
Don't get me wrong about ISAPI Rewrite -- it's an amazing tool for many things. I just don't think that given the option that EI provides here with ProductCart that ISAPI Rewrite is the best way to go for this particular issue.
Without a split A/B test here (which we'll probably never have), there's probably no way we'll ever be able to conclusively determine if one method or the other is more advantageous for the SERPs, but we can know that the EI method is more scalable, less time/cost intensive, and does deliver excellent results.
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Posted By: avalight
Date Posted: 28-April-2009 at 1:16am
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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. ------------- Curt
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Posted By: Greg Dinger
Date Posted: 28-April-2009 at 1:29am
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Hi Curt,
You're welcome.
BTW, Sean and I go back many years. We met when we were both Storefront developers. As a point of interest, Sean authored a 404-based SEO mod for Storefront 5 several years ago which has worked successfully for many moons. The big improvement of EI's approach over Sean's is how EI's adds the category and product ID in the new URL. That helps resolve problems with duplicate product titles. But Sean speaks from a background of significant depth.
I'm in the middle of upgrading a store to v3.51 which was altered by another team to support ISAPI and I have to tell you it's a bear. They made several mods which are far more difficult to manage than simply using the SEO mod, and I can't possibly disagree with Sean's remarks. ISAPI does not appear to be worth the effort for SEO. I love it, however, for mapping "old store" to "new store" URLs, and have it running on all of our servers. ------------- GreyBeard Design Group Certified ProductCart Developer Web Design/Development/Hosting http://tinyurl.com/5c8t4t" rel="nofollow - Add-Ons & Custom Code | |