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Hi Sorry, I missed the bit about the bug. Sounds like I have to upgrade to 5.2.16 after all. Thanks for the advice. Best regards

I am not sure what you mean. The tag is generating automatically and I am not skilled in coding.

Hi Since late 2014 the number of URLs indexed from my site by Google has dropped from over 300 to 32. This seems to have coincided with upgrading to version 5.2.14. I posted a question on the Google Webmaster Central Help Forum about this today - see the response below: On all of your individual product pages you have this tag which tells Google that these two pages are essentially the same and you want the OTHER one indexed <link rel="canonical" href="http://www.recycledpatterns.com/shoppingcart/index.php?_a=product"/> Can anyone explain why this tag is appearing on the product pages and what I need to do? I know I can upgrade to newer versions of CubeCart but I don't want to move to beta versions at this stage and prefer to keep my licence key for now. Thanks for any assistance or advice you can provide.

Hi Sorry my post wasn't more clear. The page with the excessive code is my fault and not a CC issue. I set up a separate landing page with a CSS menu bar and that is the cause of the problem. I also included social media buttons and this made the problem worse. I have moved the social media script further down the page and I will try to set up a simpler navigation menu. I may abandon the landing page and set up a redirect straight to the cart. I think it is better for customers to see products immediately rather than going through a landing page first. I am working on the SSL certificate first and this is another challenge as I have to change my IP address. The store will probably be offline again for a day or so. For information, the violation warning is below and it seems to be sensible advice: Search engines will largely ignore CSS code but large quantities of CSS code that precede the actual text will force the text content further down in the HTML. Since search engines may analyse only the first 100 KB of a page, it is possible that the CSS block may prevent search engines from indexing any page content.

Thanks, I'll have a look at the skin template files.

Thanks for the information.

Hi This topic has been discussed in the past but I do not understand the responses. I have noticed that H1 tags are missing in categories, sub-categories and documents other than the home page. H1 tags are essential for ranking by Bing and Yahoo. Has anyone found an efficient way to include these at a global level? As a quick fix, I have included H1 tags in the descriptions but this looks very messy and repetitive. All the best

Continuing on with my SEO audit, I am wondering if it would be worthwhile to put 'Powered by CubeCart' with a link to the CubeCart website in my footer area (alongside the copyright text). Is this within the rules? I have the paid version but I noticed the traffic dropped off when I stopped using the free version. Genuine backlinks are important to ranking so this seems to be an approach to consider. Obviously, with the free version, the title text characters are limited by the CubeCart text so the paid version is much better. Alternatively, should I consider becoming a CubeCart affiliate? All the best

Hi I'm back! The website and store is now back online - it has actually been online for a few days. The 301 redirect is now working and the sitemap is also generating perfectly as www. I don't understand this but Havenswift-hosting was correct. For the benefit of other members, the redirect needs to be done at the cPanel level and not at the server level. I am not game to redirect the index.php file yet but I have entered a redirect into the index.html file head area. I have resolved most of the SEO violations and I am down to three. One relates to excessive css code on the landing page so I moved the code to a css single file but I it has not resolved the violation. The other relates to the sitemap being too long but I will have to live with this.

Hi Again I am still a bit perplexed about the trailing forward slash issue so I checked the main.php file to find the following: <title>{$META_TITLE}</title> <link rel="canonical" href="{$CANONICAL}" /> <link rel="shortcut icon" href="{$STORE_URL}/favicon.ico" type="image/x-icon" /> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="{$STORE_URL}/skins/{$SKIN_FOLDER}/styles/common.css" media="screen" /> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="{$STORE_URL}/skins/{$SKIN_FOLDER}/styles/{$SKIN_SUBSET}/layout.css" media="screen" /> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="{$STORE_URL}/js/styles/styles.php" media="screen" /> Could the forward slash at the end of each entry be causing the problem? Also, I am happy to report that the store is back online. The problem was caused by default settings at the hosting end that point to both www and non-www. This caused a loop when the 301 redirect was set up. I will contact the hosting provider for advice on how to get around this.

Hi No custom urls, incorrect rewrite commands or third party changes. I am using CubeCart out of the box so to speak. In general, I find I need to wait for the server at the hosting end to update for any changes to activate. My partner has reversed the 301 redirect and the site is still down. Anyway, thanks for all the advice. We will try to get the store back online today.

Hi Yes my site is down due to a 301 redirect . I am not panicking yet as it is hosted in Germany and there is often a delay when making any major changes. I don't know where the trailing forward slashes are coming from but I have not made any modifications to the store - 692 SEO violations. The information above about the sitemaps and robots.txt is useful. I am hoping that the CubeCart sitemap with generate properly when the 301 redirect is in place. In regard to restrictions on the size of sitemaps by online providers, one of my SEO violation alerts was as follows: The page at " /sitemap.xml" contains 338 links. Too many links in the same page may affect the indexing process that is used by search engine crawlers. This may result in poor search rankings for the page or in the search engine ignoring the page. The size of the CubeCart generated sitemaps could be a problem if this is true. The sitemap referred to was generated by an online provider.

Thanks, that is a great suggestion. I have a similar sitemap in the public html folder but I should probably replace or delete the automatically generated one in the store folder.

Thanks. I have updated my signature and I will look into an SSL certificate and setting up SSL. I don't really understand many of the suggestions above. I can organise a 301 redirect but I am not sure how or why this should affect the way the sitemap generates. It also does not explain the forward slashes forcing unnecessary redirects. Activating SSL seems to be a separate issue. I may have to manually edit the sitemap.

Hi Ian and ayz1 No, I am not using the SSL as that page looked too complicated and I thought PayPal would offer sufficient security. I probably need to rethink that approach. I do have the www for the standard store URL on the SSL page but I have not filled in any of the other boxes. I have a separate landing page for the domain. Most of the SEO violations relate to multiple canonical formats caused by the www vs non www issue and unnecessary redirects due to forward slashes appearing at the end of links. It is all a bit strange.