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Search engine friendly URLs


Guest rukiman

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Guest rukiman

Hi,

I used to use OsCommerce but interested in trying out cube cart. OsCommerce has a Search engine friendly option in the admin, is there something similar in cube cart 3? Or is there a mod that can achieve this?

Thanks.

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I am working on a mod that does this. (plus a couple of other enhancements)

I am considering making this my first chargeable mod though (only £10 or so).

mcrockford - have you found one already then? I haven't noticed one myself.

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Guest benseb

Hi

How are you looking at building this, as I was going to look at building a similar mod - using apache mod_rewrite. Might be worth bouncing a few ideas off each other?

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mine will be a self-contained cubecart mod.

are you guys on v3 or v2? my mod will be on v2 first off, but then I should be able to port to v3.

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okay, I hope to have something to release within a week or so. initially, it will be a fairly basic version as I have a few enhancement ideas that will follow on later.

would you guys be prepared to pay £10 (=$18) for such a mod? Of course any paying customers will be entitled to free upgrades.

Alternatively, I was also thinking of a free version that would include links to my site on each page.

I imagine a v3 version would follow on a few weeks later (and after at least v3.0.1 or whatever version proves to be commonly acknowledged as 'stable' after a week of release).

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Guest rukiman

I don't mind paying that much. But I think a free version with a link to your homepage is not a bad idea also, so people can try out your mod and decide whether to purchase it.

So with your mod will you see the product names in the url to increase better ranking amongst search engines or will you see just the product ID?

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Guest GnomeyNewt

I'm very interested in a mod like this. I'll be waiting for your v3 version. (I can't wait till v3 mods start showing up, guess I'm lazy programmer :on2long:)

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The floor is open for v3 mods and there are a few starting to pop up already.

The problem is v3 is completly new 2 all of us and me and the mod creators are hanging off a bit to a bug free stable version is ready before the modding starts.

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Ideally I would like to see the product name and category name if there is room

that facility could be added on as an option I suppose.

probably best I concentrate on getting something released, bells and whistles requests will no doubt follow!

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Okay I have this going.you can see it in action in one of my live sites here.

I have yet to modify the category and product links in the side panels. this will be given in the form of instructions as I am not about to replace peoples carts completely, especially if they have mods installed. basically this system runs alongside the existing cart, if you prefer to have the categories linking to these static urls, a small mod will be necessary, else leave the existing method as it is. Of course, a link to at least the top level category will need to be inserted somewhere on your site, else it will not get spidered.

I looked at putting category and product names as part of the urls, but that is gonna require a whole new way of doing things, as having spaces or special (html etc.) characters will mess it up. the only real way is to have extra fields in the products and categories which would act as name tags for the urls.

anyway, off to bed now, hope to document and release this very soon.

any feedback appreciated...

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Im liking that my man very well done if you wanna hand to adapt the code to show cats name and prod urls just holla i been working on this for bout 6 months now as u know and happy to lend a hand.let me know if u want me to help :o

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Guest benseb

Huy guys

I will be releasing a similar mod. I work with Search Engine Optimisation, and rewriting page names is not just about avoiding confusion with search engines. This existing mod may help spiders index your pages easier, but it will not boost your rankings.

I will be making a mod which does this, and you can see how well it works on my existing site

Click here for example (we are 1st/2nd result)

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correct me if im wrong here benseb but the page u r using as example isnt cubecart? the cart is tucked away in shop folder after ticket shop link?

I also do search engine optimising but more for my products im selling have 1 store for client currently getting top 10 positions for most of there products and with the release of sculptex mod sure that will improve.

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Guest rukiman

I eventually got of my arse and did some work on my cart 3.0.1. I should have something to release for Cube cart 3 soon in a week or so.

You can look at the current progress in http://www.intimatewear.com.au

Yes some images don't load up, I'm looking into this and other stuff. :w00t:

Disadvantages/Restrictions: (may be fixed if I find them necessary */* )

1) Product name and categories do not appear in the url

2) More processing, but I haven't noticed anything. My website is slow atm cos of two things ISP & image not loading problem. Your browser will give up eventually trying to load the thumbnail images.

3) My mod uses the .htaccess to modrewrite URLs. I think this can be replaced by a PHP script that mimics the modrewrites calling upon index.php with the right variables??

Benefits:

1) Search engine friendly url, better indexing.

1) PHP session killer for search engines based on the Oscommerce code. Covers a huge list of search engines. This will give you a better PR otherwise search engines can get lost in your website receiving the same content with multiple URLs. Doesn't look good, you will get a lower ranking.

2) Very few code changes about 11 files changed most one liners (due to conditional php session starts in 10 files), URLs are automatically translated to search engine friendly urls while parsing the body. Hence developers do not have to change the current url format when coding. It just happens on the fly when the page is being served.

3) By making the URLs search engine friendly I discovered contents were not loading as they were using relative links. While parsing the body, relative links are automatically converted to absolute links too. This way the developer again needs not care.

Anyways, let me know if I'm on the right track. I have gained my knowledge on search engine friendly urls by surfing the web and forums the last few days. Have I got all angles covered?

Help I could do with to speed up things.

1) Has someone got a mod so that the productId=4 in the url can be productName=motorbike instead? This will allow be to address issue 1 fairly easily. The same would go for sitedocs. I need to be able to query using names.

Got any other ideas? Let me know.

Cheers.

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Guest rukiman

Oh yeah forgot to mention.

Another issue is the redir thats tagged at the end of the url for login, register etc links. Not sure how to handle this atm. Maybe remove these links if its a search engine crawling? Best solution I cant think of atm. But changing contents for spiders is my last resort. Anyone got any ideas?

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Guest benseb

With regards adding the product name instead of the ID, here is an idea:

Structure the id like this:

http://www.domain.com/shop/category_name/product_name/5

The 5 is the product ID and the only thing that is actually used, the cat and prod names are just ignored, but still work well for search engines. Mod_Rewrite simply looks for th e number on the end and translates this to the ID for the page. Use preg_replace to swap anything thats not A-Z or 0-9 for an _ underscore to keep it safe

Ben

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Guest rukiman

Thanks that would be easiest without much code changes. I decided not to generate the session and cart boxes if the user agent is a search engine. Couple of benefits I see

1) Means important text gets moved up the page....could mean better ranking.

2) These don't mean anything to search engines in terms of indexing, and really we aren't altering page contents we are helping these bots.

2) Search engines don't get lost or exhaust server resources because of all the

dynamically generated previous page urls. My link checker I use kept spidering my site without giving up I had over 1000 pages indexed (90% are duplicates only difference is the redir at the end of the url). Now with these changes in place it indexes the site extremely quick and still captures all the pages.

For those interested I use Xenu Link checker. I believe it will behave roughly like what your typical search engine bot would in terms of spidering.

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:) Excellent mod but is there any way we can get this showing the product name like the V2 mod I dont want to go live with cube 3 until it can be done.

Gary

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