I moved from OSCommerce about a month ago and the transition to CRE 6.4 has been fairly painless with exception of one thing, my search traffic has dropped through the floor.

The SEO plugin included in CRE 6.4 appears to serve up duplicate copies of every product in my catalogue - as anyone familiar with how search engines work will confirm this is a BIG problem.

As far as I can tell, with SEO enabled the same product can appear on it's own url or a nested url based on the category, for example:

http://www.themobilesite.co.uk/p23/Samsung-G600-LCD-Screen/product_info.html

and its identical categorised version :

http://www.themobilesite.co.uk/LCD-Screens-Samsung/c5_7/p23/Samsung-G600-LCD-Screen/product_info.html

Does anybody know how to change this behaviour so I can have one uniform url format ?

Kirk - perhaps you could help here? Can I log this as a support issue?

I could get by if it would be possible to remove the part of code that generates the "/LCD-Screens-Samsung/c5_7" part of the url...

Sorry, it would need to be submitted as a feature request to have it changed

feature requests can be submitted here
http://creforge.com/tracker/?group_id=119

Kirk,

I would have to say that if SEO is one of "The" biggest pains but most rewarding for any store or site owner, should this feature to get rid of the doubling up, not already have been thought of by the creator's of CRE and already their own feature addition in to the next release?

Therefore if it's already planned by them, it would be a pointless feature request, so does this mean they don't have the foresight to develop the CRE SEO URL Module in the next release to get shut of the issues it creates "FOR ALL" CRE Loaded Paying Clients?

Maybe I'm been synical but who knows, maybe there's a behind closed doors agreement with the creator's of the Ultimate SEO add-on, who knows hey.

Just my 2 cents anyway.

best fix.. turn off CRE seo urls.. it is 100% junk

stock urls are better..

But the cart itself will still duplicate urls

To fix

open up (depending on your template)
templates/your template/includes/product_listing_col.php (less the col if using rows)
or
includes/modules/product_listing_col.php

find


replace with

a simple way to remove the cPath/id from all product urls

removing the same type of code from other places that generates it.. ie category nav infoboxes/sitemaps

Thank you very much, I'll give this a go

I hope this module is fixed also for the next release.

I would 100% recommend junking the CRE urls, and going with one of the many many alternatives out there. SEO-G is a nice module, as is MagneticOnes Magic Url contrib, or of course Chemos SEO URLs available from myself. These all carry a cost of either time to get working with CRE or money to a devloper or comapny, but the return on investment is certainly the best you will get from any single module out there.

Hi Jason,

Can I quickly ask why or how stock URL's are better?

I don't understand if this is the case, why CRE creators will have built the CRE SEO URL module.

However, we all know it has many shortcomings though and hence I'm interested in implementing your fix mentioned above but would like a little more information if you can share it?

Also, I'd like to ask for somebody who doesn't know CRE inside out, is there a way to find out what other places generate it exactly or is your list above the only places?

Appreciated in advance.

because the stock urls do not "create" false folders ie CRE-Loaded-Support/c1/index.html
search engines WILL generate 404 errors on
category-name/
and
category-name/c1/
and on products
parent-category-name/c2_6/p14/product-name/product_info.html
you now have a product that is expected to be 3 deep
the following will be 404 errors
parent-category-name/c2_6/p14/
parent-category-name/c2_6/
parent-category-name/

the cpath (and even product ids) plays no part in a url.. in fact using it will just create even more duplicate product paths/urls/pages.. my above fixes solve at least that part

There is no permanent 301 redirect logic.. so the search engines will continue coming to and crawling original stock urls.. along with finding the rewritten urls (more duplicate pages that the search engine now needs to decide which one is best to display)

Like many things, those that are not understood get little attention.. SEO and CRE Loaded being one (h1 tags were never a part until we provided the code for it.. and they didn't even add those in correctly)

I am just glad it is open source.. and after some time.. stuff one would expect to be standard, does come into the cycle when/if it is clearly provided to CRE Loaded

I have the latest 6.4.1a update and now wanting to clean up the product and page urls. Last time I clicked on the SEO module (before the patch), I got 404 errors all over the place....but that was before the patch. My questions is this, should I still forget about the SEO in the Admin and go with an outside product like Magnetic One? Here's how ugly one of my site's url gets.....

http://tiffany lampdeals. com/product_info.php?cPath=46_47&products_id=1347

Any suggestions?

Use the contribution bellow, very easy to install and works beautifully. This is an example of the links it creates http://lond-moda.co.uk/halter-neck-dress-p-1821.html

http://addons.oscommerce.com/info/6768

Is this really the case! if a page can be reach through different url's that google drops the search rank? Of is it that the writer of this problem moved up to version 6.4 and uses a other SEO url then in previous version and that therefore his search rank is temporaly lower due to the fact that google has to re-index his site?

Marcel