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BrianRoden View Drop Down
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    Posted: 16-July-2009 at 10:22am
We're using PC 3.51 with the SEO files for pretty URLs.
 
A category page comes up like this:
 
A product page within that category comes up like:
 
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
 
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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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote Guests Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 16-July-2009 at 11:37pm
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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Greg Dinger View Drop Down
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Points: 238 		Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote Greg Dinger Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 17-July-2009 at 12:24am
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.
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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote Guests Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 17-July-2009 at 1:33am
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.
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Points: 135 		Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote ProductCart Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 17-July-2009 at 2:43am
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" Smile


Edited by earlyimp - 17-July-2009 at 2:45am
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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote Guests Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 17-July-2009 at 3:06am
Originally posted by earlyimp earlyimp wrote:

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" Smile


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.
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Greg Dinger View Drop Down
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Points: 238 		Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote Greg Dinger Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 17-July-2009 at 9:44am
Originally posted by Sean@WMS Sean@WMS wrote:

Sorry, Greg. I might not have been clear enough about what I meant here.


OK, I see that now.  ISAPI for 301 redirects is fine. 

And I am thrilled that the SEO mod will be built into V4.
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Points: 0 		Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote BrianRoden Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 17-July-2009 at 10:11am
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:
 
 
 
 
 
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 www.urlrewriting.net with regular expressions to handle fiendly URLs. Our pattern is
 
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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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote Guests Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 17-July-2009 at 6:33pm
Hi Brian,

How are you protecting against duplicate content being indexed under these different URLs?
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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote Guests Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 18-July-2009 at 1:42am
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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