category name in SEO URLs
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=2879
Printed Date: 29-April-2024 at 7:46am
Software Version: Web Wiz Forums 12.04 - http://www.webwizforums.com
Topic: category name in SEO URLs
Posted By: BrianRoden
Subject: category name in SEO URLs
Date Posted: 16-July-2009 at 10:22am
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We're using PC 3.51 with the SEO files for pretty URLs.
A category page comes up like this:
http://www.clearancecraftandhobbybooks.com/cart/pc/Crafts-c2005.htm - http://www.clearancecraftandhobbybooks.com/cart/pc/Crafts-c2005.htm
A product page within that category comes up like:
http://www.clearancecraftandhobbybooks.com/cart/pc/101-Easy-Ribbon-Projects-2005p2173.htm - http://www.clearancecraftandhobbybooks.com/cart/pc/101-Easy-Ribbon-Projects-2005p2173.htm
Is there a way to get the product page URL to also include the category? Our web marketing folks feel this would help SEO ranking even more by adding the category keyword to the URL. So it would look something like
http://www.clearancecraftandhobbybooks.com/cart/pc/Crafts-c2005/101-Easy-Ribbon-Projects-2005p2173.htm - http://www.clearancecraftandhobbybooks.com/cart/pc/Crafts-c2005/101-Easy-Ribbon-Projects-2005p2173.htm
The product detail page has the category in its breadcrumb trail, which I think it gets from the category number 2005 in the URL. The URL would be more meaningful with the category name included.
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Replies:
Posted By: Guests
Date Posted: 16-July-2009 at 11:37pm
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It's an exellent idea, Brian.
We're looking deeply now at quite a few things involving SEO and ProductCart. I'm just wrapping up an add-on tonight to give merchants more control over the dynamically generated meta tags on product and category/subcategory pages.
I have a cursory familiarity with PC's SEO mod and have used the same basic technique in the past. It is definitely doable, just not sure how involved it would be yet.
Also, I take it this is a live site with all of these pages arlready indexed in search engines. You would definitely want to make sure you use a 301 redirect map from all of the old product page URLs to all of their news ones. The best approach here would be ISAPI_rewrite. The map could be generated via a script if there are too many products to do manually.
I'd also be curious to know if EI is planning to make this an option with version 4. I understand that version 4 will have the SEO mod built in. Providing the option for merchants to decide whether they would like their URLs to include the category name would be nice.
However, not that I'm thinking more about it here, there are some issues which would need to be decided. For instance, what if the product is in a subcategory? Should the category name used in the URL be the subcat, the parent cat, or both? What if the product is in multiple categories/subcategories? What category name to use in the URL in this case?
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Posted By: Greg Dinger
Date Posted: 17-July-2009 at 12:24am
Posted By: Guests
Date Posted: 17-July-2009 at 1:33am
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Sorry, Greg. I might not have been clear enough about what I meant here. I certainly wouldn't be recommending using ISAPI_rewrite in lieu of EI's SEO mod for PC. That approach is solid, and you know I've a good deal of experience with that approach in other contexts. What I meant to be suggesting here is that as the site is already live and indexed with the current URLs for product pages, these URLs should all be 301 redirect mapped to their new locations. That use of ISAPI_rewrite is very straight forward and simple. That is, the site has a bunch of product pages indexed using the current PC SEO mod URLs, but to change this to add the category/subcategory names in those URLs would change all of those product URLs. We certainly don't want them to go to 404 errors, and we want to retain the current indexing and PR as much as possible . . . . and we want to protect against duplicate content being indexed. A 301 redirect map would be crucial IMHO and ISAPI_rewrite is the way to most easily handle it. All that being said, this is really just a tangent on the original question about customizing the PC SEO mod to handle adding category names to the product page URLs. |
Posted By: ProductCart
Date Posted: 17-July-2009 at 2:43am
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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"  ------------- The ProductCart Team Home of ProductCart http://www.productcart.com" rel="nofollow - shopping cart software |
Posted By: Guests
Date Posted: 17-July-2009 at 3:06am
That's why folks like Greg and me are here ;-) We understand that you can't possibly do EVERYTHING anyone can imagine. We developers are here to work the margins, push the boundaries, and find what modifications are truly most interesting in the various business rules merchants need . . . so that you can decide which should matriculate into the next version of ProductCart. There are still lots of questions on this thread about exactly HOW category/subcategory name should be incorporated. I'll be following this thread in hopes that folks with stores will pitch in their ideas. |
earlyimp wrote:Posted By: Greg Dinger
Date Posted: 17-July-2009 at 9:44am
Posted By: BrianRoden
Date Posted: 17-July-2009 at 10:11am
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Sean,
Regarding your question about which category name would be displayed for a product in multiple categories, or the category vs. subcategory name, on our company's main (non-PC) site, here are multiple links to the same product, with the friendly URL stuff generated based on the path taken to reach the item if you started from the home page:
http://www.leisurearts.com/items/4317/DVD-I-Cant-Believe-Im-Crocheting-Cables-Bobbles-and-Lace-in-Motion/c/DVD/s/newest/default.aspx - http://www.leisurearts.com/items/4317/DVD-I-Cant-Believe-Im-Crocheting-Cables-Bobbles-and-Lace-in-Motion/c/DVD/s/newest/default.aspx
http://www.leisurearts.com/items/4317/DVD-I-Cant-Believe-Im-Crocheting-Cables-Bobbles-and-Lace-in-Motion/c/DVD/sc/Crochet/s/newest/default.aspx - http://www.leisurearts.com/items/4317/DVD-I-Cant-Believe-Im-Crocheting-Cables-Bobbles-and-Lace-in-Motion/c/DVD/sc/Crochet/s/newest/default.aspx
http://www.leisurearts.com/items/4317/DVD-I-Cant-Believe-Im-Crocheting-Cables-Bobbles-and-Lace-in-Motion/c/Crochet/s/newest/default.aspx - http://www.leisurearts.com/items/4317/DVD-I-Cant-Believe-Im-Crocheting-Cables-Bobbles-and-Lace-in-Motion/c/Crochet/s/newest/default.aspx
http://www.leisurearts.com/items/4317/DVD-I-Cant-Believe-Im-Crocheting-Cables-Bobbles-and-Lace-in-Motion/c/Crochet/sc/DVD/s/newest/default.aspx - http://www.leisurearts.com/items/4317/DVD-I-Cant-Believe-Im-Crocheting-Cables-Bobbles-and-Lace-in-Motion/c/Crochet/sc/DVD/s/newest/default.aspx
On the first one, I went to the DVD section, and clicked directly on the item
Second, DVD category, then Crochet subcat, then item
Third, Crochet category, then item
Fourth, Crochet, DVDs, then item
The .net code-behind uses the values passed in the URL to build the breadcrumb displayed on the product page.
We use the free DLL from http://www.urlrewriting.net - www.urlrewriting.net with regular expressions to handle fiendly URLs. Our pattern is
http://www.leisurearts.com/items/itemnum/title/c/categoryname/sc/subcatname/s/sortorder/default.aspx - http://www.leisurearts.com/items/itemnum/title/c/categoryname/sc/subcatname/s/sortorder/default.aspx
Probably not the most elegant URL scheme, but this was our first major .net site (redesigning a 10-year-old standard ASP site), and the first time I've ever had to hand-roll SEO (instead of it coming from a CMS).
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Posted By: Guests
Date Posted: 17-July-2009 at 6:33pm
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Hi Brian, How are you protecting against duplicate content being indexed under these different URLs? |
Posted By: Guests
Date Posted: 18-July-2009 at 1:42am
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Hi Brian,
Aside from the duplicate content issue, which is a serious SEO issue Google make no bones about, I'm also concerned about the URL directory structure here.
I was discussing it with an SEO guy today (trained at StomperNet, which I have a lot of respect for), and I learned that there was more to this than I had been thinking.
I had beening thinking that Google PR had to do with clicks away from the home page and that there is a modicum of keyword relavance when the searched for keywords exist in the URL. And while there is some truth to that, here is a more important factore for Google -- the directory structure as they use it to interpret Information Architecture.
That is, Google looks at the directory structure and makes some assumtions that the more slashes there are from the root, the more "buried" in the site this content is, and therefore the less relevant it really is. StomperNet has tested this and found it to be true and recommends that one really never go more than three subdirectories deep from the web root for an important content.
What is more, PC really exacerbates this with their directory structure which already forces two subdirectories in a URL.
All of this being said, I think are are potentially some serious concerns with your URL rewriting approach.
Looks to me like this thread could have a really good discussion about these SEO issues. And belive you me, I know how SEO can be maddening to try to figure out what is the real answer to many SEO questions. I always say that if you ask two SEO guys one question, you will get six answers, LOL!
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Posted By: gessepi
Date Posted: 24-November-2009 at 11:53am
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Is version 4.0 gonna have the Isapi set up to display the name of the category instead of the long string in their now. As well as the product pages. ------------- Tom |
Posted By: gessepi
Date Posted: 24-November-2009 at 11:55am
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Also what is the url to the mail up console. I just installed a new computer and all of my favorites and bookmarks are gone and nowhere in the backend of product does it provide the url to get to the mail up site. ------------- Tom |
Posted By: ProductCart
Date Posted: 24-November-2009 at 12:05pm
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We do not understand the first message. Please see the http://wiki.earlyimpact.com/productcart/seo-urls - documentation on Keyword Friendly URLs for details on how to use this feature in ProductCart v4.
As for the second message, you can log in at: http://www.getmailup.com - http://www.getmailup.com ------------- The ProductCart Team Home of ProductCart http://www.productcart.com" rel="nofollow - shopping cart software |
Posted By: gessepi
Date Posted: 24-November-2009 at 12:13pm
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For instance this is the way the url is displayed now for the category Pet-Products.
http://www.ablackhorse.com/productcart/pc/viewCategories.asp?idCategory=434
With version 4.0 will this category display url be:
http://www.ablackhorse.com/productcart/pc/pet-products ------------- Tom |
Posted By: ProductCart
Date Posted: 24-November-2009 at 12:21pm
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The URL will be similar to that (it would be http://www.ablackhorse.com/productcart/pc/pet-products-c434.htm), assuming you setup your server to handle that feature and turn the feature on in the Control Panel. Again, see the documentation for details. ------------- The ProductCart Team Home of ProductCart http://www.productcart.com" rel="nofollow - shopping cart software |
Posted By: gessepi
Date Posted: 24-November-2009 at 12:25pm
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Is there anyway to not have the c434.htm on the end. ------------- Tom |
Posted By: ProductCart
Date Posted: 24-November-2009 at 12:27pm
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No. That's how the system identifies the category or product that you are loading from the database. ------------- The ProductCart Team Home of ProductCart http://www.productcart.com" rel="nofollow - shopping cart software |
Posted By: gessepi
Date Posted: 24-November-2009 at 12:37pm
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Will that be the same for the product details page as well with a -000.htm ------------- Tom |
Posted By: Greg Dinger
Date Posted: 24-November-2009 at 12:55pm
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The only way to get what you want is to host your site at a service that offers ISAPI Rewrite, then to build rules that accommodate that URL structure. We (and others) do offer that program on our servers.
I will be the first to say, however, that I really find ISAPI Rewrite a giant pain. ISAPI rules, and internal code modifications were coded by a SEO team into http://www.maximumsecurity.com - www.maximumsecurity.com last year before we redesigned the site. Working around the ISAPI stuff probably increased project time 20 percent and makes maintenance a chore.
I strongly endorse just using the SEO mod as mentioned above and only using ISAPI if you really find that you are not getting the desired results. By following this guidance your future upgrades will be easier and you will retain stock code - thus keeping your store eligibe for support. The more you alter the code, the more that EI will not be able to support if you have issues. Please consider the stock SEO functionality before you start changing things. ------------- GreyBeard Design Group Certified ProductCart Developer Web Design/Development/Hosting http://tinyurl.com/5c8t4t" rel="nofollow - Add-Ons & Custom Code | |
Posted By: gessepi
Date Posted: 27-November-2009 at 12:39pm
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My question is simple: When we upgrade to version 4.0 and activate isapi is there a means to do a 301 redirect for all of the indexed pages in the search engines so we don't lose our indexing they have already done on our old url's ------------- Tom |
Posted By: Greg Dinger
Date Posted: 27-November-2009 at 12:50pm
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You refer to ISAPI as if it were a stock feature of ProductCart. IT IS NOT.
Perhaps you are using that ISAPI terminology but are referring to the SEO mod (which DOES NOT use ISAPI-REWRITE for this functionality - it uses a 404 handler):
http://wiki.earlyimpact.com/productcart/seo-urls - http://wiki.earlyimpact.com/productcart/seo-urls If that is the case, then no, I do not believe any 301-redirect code exists for existing URLs. However, Early Impact has stated elsewhere (I cannot find it, perhaps EI will please respond here) their belief that such is unnecessary and will not count as duplicate content.
------------- GreyBeard Design Group Certified ProductCart Developer Web Design/Development/Hosting http://tinyurl.com/5c8t4t" rel="nofollow - Add-Ons & Custom Code | |
Posted By: gessepi
Date Posted: 27-November-2009 at 12:54pm
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Does this require that the servor be on IIS 7. ------------- Tom |
Posted By: Greg Dinger
Date Posted: 27-November-2009 at 12:58pm
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no, PC runs fine on IIS5 and IIS6. ------------- GreyBeard Design Group Certified ProductCart Developer Web Design/Development/Hosting http://tinyurl.com/5c8t4t" rel="nofollow - Add-Ons & Custom Code | |
Posted By: gessepi
Date Posted: 27-November-2009 at 1:17pm
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So being on iis6 and using the 404 handler it can be done so we wont lose our url's already indexed by the search engines. ------------- Tom |
Posted By: gessepi
Date Posted: 27-November-2009 at 1:18pm
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This is if we upgrade to versioin 4.0 PC that is. ------------- Tom |
Posted By: ProductCart
Date Posted: 27-November-2009 at 4:10pm
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The "must read" on Duplicate Content is this article on the official Google Webmaster Central blog:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/09/demystifying-duplicate-content-penalty.html - http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/09/demystifying-duplicate-content-penalty.html Specifically: "But most site owners whom I hear worrying about duplicate content aren't talking about scraping or domain farms; they're talking about things like having multiple URLs on the same domain that point to the same content. Like www.example.com/skates.asp?color=black&brand=riedell and www.example.com/skates.asp?brand=riedell&color=black. Having this type of duplicate content on your site can potentially affect your site's performance, but it doesn't cause penalties." In other words, there is no issue: Google understands that both product pages (with and without the keyword rich URL) point to the same content, that you were not trying to trick anyone, that it is simply that your Web site loads the same content in a couple of different ways, and that there is no issue on your Web store. The same thing would happen if you had a hard-coded search link (e.g. to load products between $50 and $100) that loads the same list of products as a category. In that case too, nothing to worry about. ------------- The ProductCart Team Home of ProductCart http://www.productcart.com" rel="nofollow - shopping cart software |