Ultimate SEO v3 (and v2.200) [Support Thread]

[Rony]

I was checking my log folder today just out of curiosity ..... and saw like 30-40 files like this one ....

[22-Jan-2013 15:44:35] PHP Warning: htmlspecialchars() [<a href='function.htmlspecialchars'>function.htmlspecialchars</a>]: Invalid multibyte sequence in argument in /public_html/store/includes/classes/seo.url.php on line 184

When I upload new products, I use plain text, actually I copy and paste from the good old Notepad. Not sure where the Special Characters are coming from ..... ?

[Kevin205]

Is this plug-in needed?

Do search engines really have problems list and optimize for PHP coded URLs?

[lhungil]

They modify same functions at few places ...

If you do a check to see what exactly is different between Zen Cart 1.5.1's stock "html_output.php" and the 1.5.1 pre merged version of the same file included with "Ultimate SEO URLs", you will notice the only line which differs is changing the function name in the original "zen_href_link" to "original_zen_href_link" and adding a replacement function for "zen_href_link". There are no other changes made by "Ultimate SEO URLs".

Keep in mind the files from "CSS3 Buttons" are for version 1.5.0 of Zen Cart and you may need to merge the file distributed with "CSS3 Buttons" with the original from Zen Cart 1.5.1. This may account for the differences you are noting...

Here is another little thing that causing a little trouble ....
For 2 of our products .... The URL's generated are like this ....
Does anyone know how to fix these blank spaces ?

The last step before any character data is saved for use in a URI is to run a filter (over every product, category, mfg, etc name) replacing all "spaces" with a "-". This replacement should not allow a space to be in any generated URI's unless something is not installed correctly or the character is not really a space...

US-ASCII, ISO-LATIN-1, and UTF8 represent the space character with decimal 32... so if you are using any of those encoding (Zen Cart 1.5.1 uses UTF8 by default) this replacement should always work. If you are using a different character encoding you may run into issues.

I was checking my log folder today just out of curiosity ..... and saw like 30-40 files like this one .... PHP Warning: htmlspecialchars() ...

Most of the times I have seen that message it is related to a character encoding mismatch... So character data being sent to the htmlspecialchars function not matching the specified character encoding. The character data is pulled from the database... and the encoding used is the one specified in Zen Cart (usually UTF-8 in a clean install of 1.5.1). I've seen this crop up sometimes with character set mismatches between the database and Zen Cart settings (typically with a mass import or upgrade).

You specified this was a new "clean" install of Zen Cart... How did you enter the product data (name, price, etc)? Please provide details including any tools or editors used as this may help us help you.

[lhungil]

Is this plug-in needed?

Depends upon your business goal. This plugin is more about adding "human readable" text (keywords) to the URL than specifically SEO.

You can read online about why having human readable words in a URL may be beneficial. You can also read (in many SEO discussions and websites) why having keywords in a URL may be beneficial for listings in a search engine.

So to keep the answer short: No you do not need this plugin... But then the same answer can be given for any and all plugins. My advice? Look at your business goals and make a decision - "human readable text with ids" or just "ids".

[lhungil]

You specified this was a new "clean" install of Zen Cart... How did you enter the product data (name, price, etc)? Please provide details including any tools or editors used as this may help us help you.

For example: Did you use an editor such as CKEditor? What character encoding do you have the database and Zen Cart set to use? Notepad by default uses ANSI not UTF-8... US-English Word uses Windows-1252. So copy / paste may cause some problems unless you save the file to UTF-8 first. Have you tried saving to UTF-8?

Did I mention how much fun working with different character sets and character encoding can be? Especially for applications used worldwide? If you have any mixed character encoding in the database it may take awhile to update them all to one encoding (I'd recommend UTF-8)...

[Kevin205]

Depends upon your business goal. This plugin is more about adding "human readable" text (keywords) to the URL than specifically SEO.

You can read online about why having human readable words in a URL may be beneficial. You can also read (in many SEO discussions and websites) why having keywords in a URL may be beneficial for listings in a search engine.

So to keep the answer short: No you do not need this plugin... But then the same answer can be given for any and all plugins. My advice? Look at your business goals and make a decision - "human readable text with ids" or just "ids".

Now it make sense. I totally agree with you.

And since I know how hard it is to code, I just wanted to say, Thank you.

[lhungil]

You are welcome.

And this is a reminder to all those who helped create, update, maintain, debug, provide feedback, comment on the forums, and provide help to other Zen Cart users. Your time and work is appreciated, and we all say thankee-sai!

[Rony]

For example: Did you use an editor such as CKEditor? What character encoding do you have the database and Zen Cart set to use? Notepad by default uses ANSI not UTF-8... US-English Word uses Windows-1252. So copy / paste may cause some problems unless you save the file to UTF-8 first. Have you tried saving to UTF-8?

You were right, it was the encoding problem. I was saving everything in ANSI (default Notepad format) not UTF-8. As soon as I switched to UTF-8, everything is working great. Thanks for your advise. Really appreciate it.

Regarding merging CSS3-Buttons with Ultimate-SEO, I guess I should wait until an expert merges it, I am not very good in PHP, and don't want to mess-up my working and earning shopping-cart.

[shags38]

Hi,
1.3.9h

yesterday I loaded Ultimate SEO URLS v2.110 onto a site and today I had a warning email from Google in WMT saying that I had excessive NO FOLLOW errors - 200+ in fact - ALL in this exact format:
index.php?currency=CAD&main_page=index&index_php%3Fmain_page=product_info&produc ts_id=528&sort=3a&page=9 ... ALL exactly the same except for id number. All 301 re-directs.

Is there a fix for this - please?

cheers,
Mike

[lhungil]

Hi,
1.3.9h

yesterday I loaded Ultimate SEO URLS v2.110 onto a site and today

Any reason you loaded an old version instead of the latest (2.212)?

I had a warning email from Google in WMT saying that I had excessive NO FOLLOW errors - 200+ in fact

Interesting. This plugin does not add any "nofollow" or "noindex" tags to your website (not in links or the header). Did they say "nofollow" or "redirect"? Excessive "redirect" would make more sense... If you are positive it is "nofollow" read the next paragraph. Otherwise skip ahead.

I have heard rumors in the SEO world in regards to addition penalties being applied for "over optimization"... And "nofollow" used on internal links in the past has been abused to manipulate page ranking... You might want to check and make sure you are not using this attribute on a large number of links.

ALL in this exact format:
index.php?currency=CAD&main_page=index&index_php%3Fmain_page=product_info&produc ts_id=528&sort=3a&page=9 ...

Strange. I see an attempt at two main_page query terms for two different pages (index = category / main, product_info = product page). This URI does not match the ones generated by Zen Cart or the ones generated by the "Ultimate SEO URLs" plugin.

After browsing your website for about 15 minutes I did not see any links like these on your website... Where is Google seeing these? External links? Sitemap? Etc? You will want to find where these links are coming from and correct them if possible.

While you could add a RewriteCond / RewriteRule to your web server config to match these bad links and correct them, it is almost always better to find and fix any broken links at the source.

ALL exactly the same except for id number. All 301 re-directs.

Yes, the old versions automatically used a 301 redirect from the Zen Cart URIs to the ones generated by "Ultimate SEO URLs". They also had issues with "index.php?" appearing twice in the same URI (which should never happen - and could indicate something broken in a template or other add-on).

Automatic 301 redirects are optional in the current version (additional canonical link support has been added). Keep in mind changing a URL using a 301 redirect does incur a minor initial penalty to page rank in most search engines if the page is already ranking.