Magic SEO URL vs Ultimate SEO URL vs SEO_G

[capnhairdo]

Re: lack of support for Magic SEO URLs. Have just done another maddening and unproductive round of correspondence with the developer. I reported several minor issues I was having with MSEO, to which I was alternately told that the problems did not exist, weren't really problems, or were mine to deal with...and that if I didn't like it, I didn't have to use his software. Though he claims to not have enough time to offer answers to support questions, Jiri seems to have plenty of time to write combative and dismissive emails to his customers and vehemently defend the decision to make his software closed-source. Which would be fine if he'd only support it.

MSEO is a very decent product. I continue to use it. Just know that any attempts to get support or suggest improvements seem usually to become arguments. Probably easier to ask the Zen community...at least you MIGHT get an answer that way.

One issue I discovered is that products that have incorrect categorizations, e.g. associated with disabled/deleted categories or with an invalid "master" category, seem to throw a 404 with MSEO installed. The pages still come up fine, but if you look at the header, you'd see 404 instead of 200. Of course, these miscategorized products should be fixed anyway (I think it's not cool Zen even allows this to happen); but be vigilant in checking your links sitewide with MSEO installed to make sure you don't have any of these erroneous 404s popping up.

Just upgraded from 1.0 to 1.1. A few nice new features. However, suddenly all my product page URLs now have the categories removed from them (though the category page URLs themselves are fine). e.g.,

babybestbuy.com/baby-bedding-1/crib-bedding-11/vinyl-mattress-cover-438.html
is now
babybestbuy.com/vinyl-mattress-cover-438.html

Anybody else experiencing this? I suppose it's not a huge problem for us since we just launched, and attempts to hit the old URLs redirect to the new ones anyway; and it could actually be better for search engines, since the new version means no duplicate content for products that are in multiple categories.