Magic SEO URL vs Ultimate SEO URL vs SEO_G

[lankeeyankee]

Well, after having MSU installed for over 6 weeks my site still wasn't getting indexed by Google even if you searched for the domain name. Our ebay store was coming up and links here the zen forum, but not my site! I was getting a bit fidgety, I know that it can take a little while for a new site to get indexed, but I thought that 6+ weeks should have been long enough for the site to show up when you searched the actual domain name! Then I saw that my live, non MSU or any other SEO, test site was already indexed and coming up on page 1 of Google for the (real) test product that I had on it, and this was only after about 2 or 3 weeks!! That did it. I uninstalled MSU, made new XML sitemaps and submitted to the search engines, and now 10 days later I am starting to show up on Google.

There were several other things that I didn't like about MSU. Such as: I have "show cart after adding item to cart" disabled and MSU disabled the "you have successfully added the item to cart" message that would appear instead. Test users were confused about if the item had been added to the cart or not -- not good! There were a few other issues, too, like ezpages and defined pages that aren't stock zen define pages would still have the dynamic URL.

The author was fast at geting back to me when I had a little trouble getting it installed, but when it came to correcting these issues he basically said that I was on my own to figure it out(I am a fledgling coder and looking at rewrite rules was total gibberish to me then, but I am learning about them right now and it makes more sense) and then support sort of dropped off, and I started getting frustrated. I guess he must be too busy making money. When you have paid for a product you should get a fully functional product with support to correct whatever issues arise!!!

So I guess the SEO issue is a non-issue as far as indexing and ranking go, but from a human user point of view it's much nicer to see logical phrasing in the address instead of the dynamic query string in the address. And when you are searching the web for something and you see example.com/kitchen-appliances-1/professional-blender43.html versus example.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&product_id=43 you might be more inclined to choose the keyword rich address since it makes sense to you and you can see it is for the item that you are looking for.

[capnhairdo]

Was using Ultimate SEO 2.105. It took some trial and error to get it working correctly, but once it did, it was great. One problem: it doesn't change EZPage URLs, and we have a lot of articles on our site posted with EZPages.

Removing Ultimate SEO was a bit tricky...you have to remove all the files it adds:

admin\includes\extra_datafiles\seo.php
admin\includes\functions\extra_functions\seo.php
admin\includes\reset_seo_cache.php
includes\auto_loaders\config.ultimate_seo.php
includes\classes\seo.install.php
includes\classes\seo.url.php
includes\extra_datafiles\seo.php

Then remove the chunks it adds to:

admin\categories.php
admin\product.php
includes\functions\html_output.php

Then remove the database tables and columns it adds. There's a function called uninstall_settings() in includes\classes\seo.install.php which you can grab the SQL from to do this.

The remove all the rewrite rules in your .htaccess file it adds.


Once done, I decided to try Magic SEO URLs instead.

PROS:

• Installation: truly a two-minute, painless procedure. I like that it only adds a single file to your zencart folder.

• Support: Impressive. When things didn't quite work as expected, I was very pleasantly surprised to find the vendor very responsive, even FTPing into my site (with my permission) to diagnose a misconfiguration at the webhost, and devising a workaround.

• Changes addresses for all pages, including EZPages, Define Pages, etc.

• (When properly configured) won't allow more than a single SEO-friendly address for a page, and redirects from any variations it recognizes to the correct address with a 301. Ultimate SEO URLs allows an infinite number of possible URLs as long as they end with the correct category/product/etc. ID.

CONS:

• Closed source, pay-for add-on.

• Documentation: very brief instructions for installation, nothing else.

• Adds a link to the Magic SEO site on the bottom of your site pages. Can be hidden with CSS, and if you insist, the vendor will send you another copy of the add-on with it removed.

• When the add-on didn't work with my custom 404 page, as the vendor said it should, he threw it back to me to muddle with the rewrite rules to get it working.


I also tried Ultimate SEO URLs 3.0 beta. Also impressive and quite possibly a better deal than Magic SEO.

• Installation: copy lots of new files, edit various existing files, try adding a couple different chunks of rewrite rules in your .htaccess and see which works.

• Documentation: Extensive but not yet complete.

• Various "URL Plugins" allow you to enable/disable URL rewriting specifically for products, categories, EZ pages, review pages, search results, etc.

• Must enable the "Core: Default" URL plugin, or links to Define pages (Contact, Sitemap, Unsubscribe, Privacy) don't work.

• Can choose the file extension: nothing, "/", ".html", etc.

• Can strip out invalid chars from URLs, convert to lowercase, etc.

• Like version 2.1, still allows infinite variations on URLs, exposing your site to potential duplicate content penalties.

[capnhairdo]

A couple more notes:

Ultimate SEO URLs modifies the core zen_href_link() function to replace default zen cart addresses with the new SEO-friendly ones. This is nice because you can use this function in other modules and scripts to find what the new addresses are going to be.

Magic SEO URLs doesn't touch any core functions and seems to leave the links alone until all HTML output is done, at which point it does a search-and-replace through the output for all links in the form href="address" and replaces them with its SEO-friendly versions just before delivering the content to the browser. Which is okay, except there's no way to tell programatically what the new URLs are going to be (unless you wanted to go to the trouble of writing a function to emulate how it builds its URLs).

[Sidenote: There may be times when you want to know what the current page is. With MSU or USU, if you get the [FONT="Courier New"]$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'][/FONT], it'll give you MSU's or USU's URL (e.g. http://yourstore.com/prod-category-1/), but there's no way to easily figure out how this corresponds to an actual zencart page. Instead, use [FONT="Courier New"]$_SERVER['PHP_SELF'].'?'.$_SERVER['QUERY_STRING'][/FONT] to find out what the actual zencart URL is (e.g. /store/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=1_4) that the SEO URL replaces. (Probably want to strip off the catalog and zenid if any.) There may be a zen function that also provides this value.]

One more caveat about MSU: it will ONLY work on the domain you specify when you purchase it, and that server has to be live and public, which makes it impossible to use on a development server. But if you do have a development server (or additional store domain) that's public, the vendor is willing to modify the code to reference the additional domain(s).

[capnhairdo]

Correction: USU 3 beta works well in some situations. Just tried it on another server (GoDaddy) and it blew up, every link giving a 404 error. Several other people cited the same problem (specifically with GoDaddy hosting), but no solution to be found anywhere.

From what I can tell on this extensive thread, the mod is riddled with known glitches that nobody is working on (though some patches have been released and can be downloaded from post 1201 on pg. 121). It appears it will probably never make it to a production version unless somebody else picks up development. Anyway, use USU 3 beta at your own risk. For now, I'm sticking with Magic SEO.

[yellow1912]

If we all agree to stick with a rather not so beautiful link like this:
site.com/name1/value1/name2/value2
and so on....
ie:

http://www.site.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=846&zenid=268a880d7asdqwdax12214e4c5266a0
Becomes:
http://www.site.com/main_page/product_info/products_id/846/zenid/268a880d7asdqwdax12214e4c5266a0

Then things will become much easier, and I can try with a super simple module that does this.

In my opinion, the link above is clean, predictable, understandable, nice to look at, isn't that the main point?
(And unlike magic SEO, it will work with all custom defined pages and such, no exception, no need to rewrite anything)

[jeking]

That's an interesting idea but, for me, it misses the point. I use these tools so the url uses words not numbers. When I shop, I do look at the url as a clue to the product and my place within the site. As a site owner, it helps those shoppers like me and causes no harm for those don't use the url.

[yellow1912]

You kinda lost me there, since I dont understand why should you look at the url to figure out where you are, while the page header + page title + page breadcrum + page content already let you know that.

The main point of seo url, for me is to clean up the query string, and to make the link look nice and neat. Most users dont care about the urls anyway.

[capnhairdo]

Ultimate SEO URLs modifies the core zen_href_link() function to replace default zen cart addresses with the new SEO-friendly ones. This is nice because you can use this function in other modules and scripts to find what the new addresses are going to be.

Magic SEO URLs...[gives]...no way to tell programatically what the new URLs are going to be (unless you wanted to go to the trouble of writing a function to emulate how it builds its URLs).

Just discovered there is in fact a function in MSEO to do this:

unmagicseomakefancyurl($url)

. Should change any Zen URL you pass it to its MSEO counterpart.

(Discovered by decoding the (annoyingly) Zend-encoded MSEO code.)


Edit: link removed by moderator

[lankeeyankee]

Just discovered there is in fact a function in MSEO to do this:

unmagicseomakefancyurl($url)

. Should change any Zen URL you pass it to its MSEO counterpart.

(Discovered by decoding the (annoyingly) Zend-encoded MSEO code.)

How did you decode it? I would like to "look under the hood" of my MSU install to correct a few things, too. Then maybe I would re-install it.