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I've been looking at setting up the HDSEO for my site, but given that I've got around 400 products, it's going to take a lot of work to create a re-write rule for every single one.
However I've been wondering if this would actually be necessary for the following reasons:
1) Each product has an ID eg ACC01
2) Each product also, of course, has a name eg "Pair of Double Ended Trigger Hooks"
3) Looking at the ordinary SEO code in CORE_Display.php, where it creates the URL for the product eg
http://www.affordable-leather.co.uk/shop/ecom-prodshow/ACC01.html
would it not be possible to use the product name for the URL instead of the ID?
4) If so, could I use the HDSEO code to remove the shop/ecom-prodshow/ section and simply have a url of
http://www.affordable-leather.co.uk/Pair+of+Double+Ended+Trigger+Hooks.html
which would still give the high definition effect but meaning I'd only have to include re-write code for the categories without needing to do it for every product?
Does this sound feasible or am I barking up the wrong tree?
Any comments would be welcomed.
Last edited by Graham (01-01-2011 10:29:37)
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While it is possible to modify the link_build method of the CORE_Display class so that it builds links in a specified format such as:
For products:
www.domain.com/item--the-single-hyphenated-product-name--the-product-id.html
and then create a single mod_rewrite rule to reverse it:
^item--(.*)--(.*).html$ index.php?app=ecom&ns=prodshow&ref=$2 [L,PT]
This customization to the linking structure would be undone if any future CCP upgrades were to overwrite
the CORE_Display.php file which is highly likely.
The way to overcome this is for future versions of CCP to include a "hook" that is called during the link_build method so that user scripts can modify the URL structure via ext files.
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The system will only allow one item with a specific entry in the id field, the rest are not checked so it is possible to have more than one item with the same name entry. Now it is possible to mod the url to look anyway you want but wither you do it thru HDSEO or some other method you still need to get back to the product id so that ccp can find the correct product in the database and make the display.
John
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My logic covers all of those concerns.
Create the URLs via link_build with item or cat or page prefix, then name, then ref delimited by double hyphens
This creates the SEO friendly URL. The prefix tells htaccess what namespace to rewrite to and the ref tells htacess what CCP ref to look up.
The only thing needed is a way to prevent future CCP updates from overwriting the code alterations. I have made suggestions to Nick.
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Thanks for the comments, guys.
I think this would make an excellent addition to Europacart7 because, from looking around here, it seems that I'm not the only person with HDSEO problems caused by large numbers of products and the need to write an individual rule for each one, but there's no point in writing code which could get over-written.
All that would be necessary is make sure that the Product Name is SEO friendly and unique which would be a lot easier.
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Wouldn't this cause a duplicate content penalty if you change the name of an item?
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Possibly but why would you need to change the name of an item?
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vbsaltydog wrote:
Possibly but why would you need to change the name of an item?
Even if I did (which would be a very rare event), surely that would only matter until the next Cron job runs and updates the site map?
If it was that much of a problem, surely I could always create a "new" item with enough changes in the text to make it "different".
In any case, the amount of time and hassle it would save writing 400 re-write rules would be worth it, I think.
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Graham wrote:
vbsaltydog wrote:
Possibly but why would you need to change the name of an item?
Even if I did (which would be a very rare event), surely that would only matter until the next Cron job runs and updates the site map?
If it was that much of a problem, surely I could always create a "new" item with enough changes in the text to make it "different".
In any case, the amount of time and hassle it would save writing 400 re-write rules would be worth it, I think.
Well, I think it would be very easy to copy the old SEO style (forget who wrote that) where it's like this-
cat--Item-Name-Goes-here--ref.html
Would that be what you'd want? Then you don't even have to update the HDSEO when you change names,
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I thought the point of the HD SEO was to have http://your_domain/item_name without eg /shop/ecom-prodshow/ being in there which is the equivalent of not having cat--item-name-goes-here--ref.html
As mentioned at the start, if I can use HDSEO to get rid of /shop/ecom-prodshow/ or /shop/ecom-cat/ and then simply change the code in CORE_display to use the product name instead of ID that would work, but as vbsaltydog says, if CORE_display was subsequently changed due to a program update, that modification would be lost which would not be desirable.
It would, I think, make more sense for everyone (and be of greater benefit) if the basic Europacart7 SEO code was changed by Kryptronic to allow us to have the choice of using Product ID or Product Name as the identifier by putting an option in the SEO activation section of the Admin, then the HDSEO can be used to strip out /shop/ecom-prod/ etc if desired.
I hope you will suggest this to Nick because all Europacart7 and CCP7 customers would benefit from it.
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In any case you have to have something in the SEO URL that tells CCP what namespace to execute so you cant have
http://www.domain.com/product-name.html
as this does not offer a way for htaccess to convert the URL back into
http://www.domain.com/index.php?app=eco … f=whatever
since there is nothing in
http://www.domain.com/product-name.html
that htaccess can use to differentiate catshow namespaces from prodshow namespaces, not to mention cms pages, etc.
What you are suggesting with product name -> product id substitutions also adds more sql calls to CCP.
The theoretical concept of what you want is easy but the practical application is more complex. Achievable, but complex.
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Ok, so it would have to be yourdomain/prod--product-name or yourdomain/cat--category-name but that should still help with SEO, wouldn't it?
And don't you think it would still make sense to have this as a general SEO option rather than using Product ID which is probably for many users, an "internal" reference that is more of use to the retailer than the customer who would find the Product Name more helpful.
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PS BTW is there an error in the HDSEO pdf?
Where it says:
Example entries: Default SEO URL High Definition SEO URL /ecom-login/KHXCseo.html /Login /ecom-cat/PROD-ID-1.html /Prod1 /ecom-cat/PROD-ID-2.html /Prod2.html /ecom-cat/ PROD-ID-3.html /products/Prod3.html /ecom-cat/CAT-ID-1.html /categories/Cat1.html
Why does PROD-ID-3 have the HDSEO URL of /products/Prod3.html instead of just /Prod3.html ?
Does anyone know?
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Graham wrote:
Ok, so it would have to be yourdomain/prod--product-name or yourdomain/cat--category-name but that should still help with SEO, wouldn't it?
Yes, it would. This has not been argued.
Graham wrote:
And don't you think it would still make sense to have this as a general SEO option rather than using Product ID which is probably for many users, an "internal" reference that is more of use to the retailer than the customer who would find the Product Name more helpful.
No. The reason that CCP uses the id vs the name to find things is because the id is the database table's primary key and therefor cannot be duplicated. This ensures that if the CCP ref is xxx , there is only one row in the table with an id of xxx.
Last edited by vbsaltydog (01-03-2011 21:32:48)
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Graham wrote:
Ok, so it would have to be yourdomain/prod--product-name or yourdomain/cat--category-name but that should still help with SEO, wouldn't it?
It is very debatable whether or not changing the URLs at all will help SEO. 5 to 10 years ago it might have but it is questionable whether or not it makes any difference nowadays.
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Dave wrote:
Graham wrote:
Ok, so it would have to be yourdomain/prod--product-name or yourdomain/cat--category-name but that should still help with SEO, wouldn't it?
It is very debatable whether or not changing the URLs at all will help SEO. 5 to 10 years ago it might have but it is questionable whether or not it makes any difference nowadays.
I think it looks better for users who are pulling up browser history to find the page they're looking for, but like you, I don't really think it helps with SEO.
(I personally don't believe that-- not saying that as an official response for Kryptronic)
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kryptsupport wrote:
I think it looks better for users who are pulling up browser history to find the page they're looking for, but like you, I don't really think it helps with SEO.
History in browser shows the page title not the actual URL so it's a moot point in that regard.
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If you look at the top 5 Google results for any random search term then you will see that SEO friendly URLs and Query String URLs are both listed so it is not a huge factor in that regard however, if the searched term is repeated a few times in an SEO friendly URL and only once or not at all in the Query String URL then you may gain a small amount of ranking favor but nothing major.
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Dave wrote:
kryptsupport wrote:
I think it looks better for users who are pulling up browser history to find the page they're looking for, but like you, I don't really think it helps with SEO.
History in browser shows the page title not the actual URL so it's a moot point in that regard.
My version of firefox shows the title above and the URL below that, a 2 line thing for each web page. I believe that's the default.
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Weird, have never seen a history like that. My history has the title on the left and the URL to the right. Regardless, I'll still maintain that URLs really don't matter much in the end.
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Ok, so given what people have said above ie that URLS really don't matter much to Search Engines these days, it begs another question:
Was it really worth my forking out $29 for the HDSEO XMOD in the first place...???
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Graham wrote:
Ok, so given what people have said above ie that URLS really don't matter much to Search Engines these days, it begs another question:
Was it really worth my forking out $29 for the HDSEO XMOD in the first place...???
I've seen several clients use this mod to allow easy to remember SEO URL's.
Such as
yourcompany.com/support
yourcompany.com/contact
yourcompany.com/search
and various other things which would make it easy to direct a client to over the phone.
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Graham wrote:
Ok, so given what people have said above ie that URLS really don't matter much to Search Engines these days, it begs another question:
Was it really worth my forking out $29 for the HDSEO XMOD in the first place...???
If you write well formed HDSEO URLs for your hottest items and it raises you from page two to page one of the Google results then it was 29.00 well spent.
SEO is all about having every advantage you can over your competitors, no matter how small.
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I have just released an XMOD for CCP v7 that automatically creates SEO friendly URLs with category and product names embedded but without the need for you to create/manage the rewriterules. It will also survive any CCP updates without being overwritten! Have a look at:
http://www.cartmod.com/clickcartpro-7-m … meseo.html
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As mentioned in the OP my URLs are currently formatted as...
ttp://www.affordable-leather.co.uk/shop/ecom-prodshow/ACC01.html
... because my Europacart 7 store is installed in the directory /shop/
I have two questions:
1) Will the Extreme SEO Xmod be able to deal with this ok?
2) Will it remove the /shop/ from the url or do I have to create a rewrite rule to take that out myself?
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