Search Engine Optimization - Brand Names & SEO URL

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Brand Names & SEO URL

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=4977
Printed Date: 03-December-2024 at 12:55pm
Software Version: Web Wiz Forums 12.04 - http://www.webwizforums.com

Topic: Brand Names & SEO URL

Posted By: GreggS
Subject: Brand Names & SEO URL
Date Posted: 06-February-2012 at 3:10pm

1st post...1st time using ProductCart.

Spent a lot of time figuring out how to get the Keyword SEO URL's to work and for the most part its working ok.

Content pages show up ok.

/About-Us-d2.htm

Category pages show up ok.

/Clearance-Overstock-c81.htm

However the Brands pages don't show up ok. If I'm in the viewbrands.asp page and click on a brand i get this...

/showsearchresults.asp?IDBrand=72&iPageSize=12&pageStyle=

If I'm on a product page and I click on the brand name link I get this...

/showsearchresults.asp?IDBrand=72

I remember having to go into certain files and changing a little code for this to work. Is there something I'm missing? Or is this how brands will show up.

Replies:

Posted By: Greg Dinger
Date Posted: 06-February-2012 at 3:17pm

The current code does not support SEO-friendly URLs for brand search results, although you are correct, it would be great if it could.

404.asp and pcSeoLinks.asp are the scripts that represent the core of the SEO-friendly URLs. If you have a comfort level with code, those are the files to attack if you want to try to implement logic to make this happen.

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Posted By: Guests
Date Posted: 07-February-2012 at 6:50pm

Hi GreggS,

The thing is, brands don't actually have pages. Products, Categories and Content Pages have pages -- and therefore content that can be use for effective SEO. They also have custom meta tags. Browse by Brand (viewbrands.asp) has a page, but brands themselves don't have a page; the links are just a link to search results.

To be effective for SEO, you'd need more content than just a search results page with a "pretty" or "keyword-rich" URL.

That being said, yes, 404.asp could be tweaked easily enough to server.transfer to showsearchresults.asp and capture the brand ID from the URL.

Posted By: GreggS
Date Posted: 09-February-2012 at 12:05pm

Thanks for the responses. I didn't realize that the brands pages were search results and not actual pages. I'm probably going to make a category link with all the brands.

Posted By: GreggS
Date Posted: 02-April-2012 at 1:04pm

I just noticed something while testing our site. Our current setting for displaying products is

5 rows 3 columns (15 products at a time)
high price listed first

When browsing products by brand that has more than 1 page, the first page shows up ok, but when i click on the 2nd page it switches to low price.

This doesn't happen when browsing products by the categories we set up. Everything works fine there.

Posted By: Guests
Date Posted: 03-April-2012 at 6:58pm

GreggS wrote:

I just noticed something while testing our site. Our current setting for displaying products is

5 rows 3 columns (15 products at a time)
high price listed first

When browsing products by brand that has more than 1 page, the first page shows up ok, but when i click on the 2nd page it switches to low price.

This doesn't happen when browsing products by the categories we set up. Everything works fine there.

Yep, there's a bug in here. To fix this, open /pc/inc_srcPrdQuery.asp and near the top find:

strORD=getUserInput(request("order"),4)
if NOT validNum(strORD) or trim(strORD)="" then
	strORD=3
end if

change that to:

strORD=getUserInput(request("order"),4)
if NOT validNum(strORD) or trim(strORD)="" then
	strORD=strPrdOrd
end if
if NOT validNum(strORD) or trim(strORD)="" then
	strORD=3
end if

While looking into this and something else, I stumbled upon another similar bug in here.

Say you make a link to a brand using only its brand ID (showsearchresults.asp?IDBrand=1). The links on the paginated page navigation will now ignore default settings for the number of items to show on the page and be set to 6 items per page.

To fix this, in the same file at almost the very top, find:

if (iPageSize="") then
	iPageSize=6
end if
if (not IsNumeric(iPageSize)) then
	iPageSize=6
end if

and change it to:

if (iPageSize="") OR (not IsNumeric(iPageSize)) then
	iPageSize=(scPrdRow*scPrdRowsPerPage)
end if
if (not IsNumeric(iPageSize)) then
	iPageSize=6
end if

Posted By: Guests
Date Posted: 04-April-2012 at 1:30am

I should that in

iPageSize=6

the number "6" here is completely arbitrary and just a fail-safe as EI wrote the code. The revisions here shouldn't ever have to lean on this, but as it is a hard-coded value, one could change the 6 here to whatever they want to be the setting of "last resort" as it were.

Posted By: gerryreid
Date Posted: 22-August-2012 at 9:33pm

I Think that all worth configuring, but it would be more prospective when you categorize every brand pages.

Posted By: GreggS
Date Posted: 15-February-2013 at 11:52am

We are in the process now of redirecting our old pages to our new pages. I saw this page on the wiki on http://wiki.earlyimpact.com/productcart/marketing-home_page" rel="nofollow - how to redirect the home page using code but that was just the home page. My boss gave me access to the web host control panel which allows me to redirect page by page. Our old site was built mainly around brands. So I've been redirecting our old pages which are mainly index.htm pages to the brands "pages" on our new site. One of the first things I discovered with ProductCart is that anything under the view brands page are not actually pages but search results. I figured pointing to there would be fine, but after a few days some of our old index pages that ranked well on google now fell off.

Example: if you search "Ascaso" in google, our old index page ranked 2nd. Now that page is gone. (There currently is a sub index page for "grinders" there but that might disappear shortly too)

I'm assuming that a showsearchresults.asp like this

http://www.1st-line.com/store/pc/showsearchresults.asp?idcategory=84&priceFrom=0&priceUntil=999999999&sku=&IDBrand=1&keyWord=&customfield=0&IDSale=0&resultCnt=15&order=2&Submit.x=46&Submit.y=9

or even something shorter like

http://www.1st-line.com/store/pc/showsearchresults.asp?idcategory=84&IDBrand=1

is not an actual page that google will rank.

I'm starting to build a category for brands and going to re-redirect the old index pages. I have a couple concerns. In the control panel you put the old page you want to redirect, the new page you want to redirect to and there's a option that says " A permanent redirection for this resource." If I delete the redirect will the old page show up or are they now permanently redirected?

Posted By: Guests
Date Posted: 15-February-2013 at 1:12pm

Hi Gregg,

This does seem to cause confusion with folks -- that brand "pages" are actually just search result pages (showsearchresults.asp?IDBrand=1 is all that is needed). It would be nice to have actual brand pages (complete with customizable meta title and description fields and a field for description/copy content).

To answer your question:

I'm starting to build a category for brands and going to re-redirect the old index pages. I have a couple concerns. In the control panel you put the old page you want to redirect, the new page you want to redirect to and there's a option that says " A permanent redirection for this resource." If I delete the redirect will the old page show up or are they now permanently redirected?

No. A "permanent redirect" is a 301 redirect -- but a redirect nonetheless. So, if you delete it, either the old page will resolve again, or a 404 status will occur.

Posted By: GreggS
Date Posted: 16-February-2013 at 1:13pm

I just checked today and now the " http://www.1st-line.com/store/pc/showsearchresults.asp?IDBrand=1" rel="nofollow - showsearchresults " brand page for Ascaso has popped back on the 1st page on google at #10 so I'm guessing it does rank but not as good as an actual page. I just re-redirected the old index.htm page to our new " http://www.1st-line.com/store/pc/Ascaso-c330.htm" rel="nofollow - category " brand page so we'll see how that works.

Posted By: GreggS
Date Posted: 22-February-2013 at 11:25am

I checked today and now the "category" brand page now shows 3rd. Alot better than the "showsearchresults" brand page.

Posted By: GreggS
Date Posted: 01-March-2013 at 11:34am

I found another issue which is a little similar to another post I had earlier in this thread.

We are starting to build a http://www.1st-line.com/store/pc/Technical-Support-Index-d70.htm" rel="nofollow - tech support section . It's going to be broken down by brand and there will be a section for http://www.1st-line.com/store/pc/General-Tech-Support-e202.htm" rel="nofollow - General Tech Support . In the General Tech Support section, we have a whole bunch of pages configured under there already. Our default subpage display is 5 rows 3 per row which is 15 total. If you try to go to page 2, it takes me http://www.1st-line.com/store/pc/viewPages.asp?page=2&iPageSize=15" rel="nofollow - here which is page 2 of the viewpages.asp page. Not very good with code, but I'm assuming the code to display page numbers is the same across all content pages. Is there a fix for this?

Posted By: GreggS
Date Posted: 17-October-2014 at 11:57am

We just updated our site to V5, and we are working though all the issues that pop up. One of which is the SEO URL links.

Some products on our site have very long winded names like the one below

     http://www.1st-line.com/store/pc/Ascaso-Brass-Boiler-Heating-Element-220V-Dream-Arc-Elipse-Steel-Non-Professional-with-brass-boilers-330p1784.htm

On V4.7 I figured out the most important part was the code on the end so I could shorten it to

     http://www.1st-line.com/store/pc/330p1784.htm

or didn't even matter what was before the code just so long as that code was intact.

     http://www.1st-line.com/store/pc/TheSkyisBlue-330p1784.htm

Now on V5 for any links to work, the link MUST be word-for-word as the name of the product otherwise the link won't work. After going through all the links on the website, I realized there must be some people have posted links in forums that are now broken.

Is it possible to fix this back to the old way?

Posted By: smithjames
Date Posted: 16-April-2019 at 3:02am

Hi!

I am new in this forum. i am very glad to join that thread. Thanks for sharing that thread with us..

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