SEO - Urls for ZC 1.5 ?

Hi
Ive been through some of the older threads for SEO urls.

It seems there is

Simple SEO URL - Was good? Now not being updated. Also.. ive used this before and had webmaster tools crawling errors

Magic SEO URL - I ordered this, ima bit worried about it.. looking at the threads. I get a lot of backlinks to my products and my URLS are sacred.. I dont want them to "change" at a later date when the software is updated.

Power URLS? - Any good?

Any up to day advice/experiences appreciated

So really what i want is a program i can load 20 articles into. Click a button and it will give me one long article with the individual articles un-modified just separated by a pipe

Ultimate SEO URLs is working on my fresh 1.5.0 testing site here:

http://www.prom-mart.com/zencart/

I posted the confirmation in the 1.5 thread:

http://www.zen-cart.com/forum/showthread.php?t=183643&page=15

However, some are having problems when upgrading, but looks like it is being fixed here:

http://www.zen-cart.com/forum/showthread.php?t=194441

I use Simple SEO on one of my secondary sites; doesn't look like it is being upgraded.

I've used Magic SEO in the past, thought it worked good, but we recently noticed and confirmed with the developer that your product name cannot end in numbers. Which was hard for us, as we like to list our products by designer and style number.

Don't know if I'd buy another commercial seo mod. Would either stay with dynamic urls or go with the upgraded Ultimate SEO URL.

IMO, any seo rewriter is dangerous until if and when it is built in to the core zencart. But I may take a chance with Ultimate SEO when I get to 1.5 (probably won't upgrade my sites, just do a fresh install.)

sph

http://www.prom-mart.com/ (my testing area)

https://www.prommart.com
https://www.fashion-mart.biz

There is also CEON URI rewriter, but you will have to buy the upgraded mod to rewrite existing products. Otherwise, you'd have to click each one to rewrite...it all depends on how many products you have and how much time, I suppose.

Thanks
Ill have a look at ultimate...

Its surprising that after SOOO many updates to ZC they havent included "SEO Urls" in it.

Im really much more interested in

a) No Crawl errors. Simple SEO is giving me over 5000 crawl errors!

b) Good handling of EZ pages - being able to choose the URL path i want to use

CEON does allow you to choose the URL for every page if you want. It is also coded to work well with most if not all other mods (when an issue came up related to the way some mods look up cPath, Conor made an immediate fix to account for both methods).

I agree that CEON URI is probably the safest rewriter and can give the prettiest urls. But it will not work with Easy Populate 4 uploads unless you purchase the additional mod to rewirte existing or uploaded products. My testing is that if you upload products via EP, you still have to go product by product, clicking to generate CEON for those products.

I am thinking of one day having "clients" and think that some might prefer Ultimate SEO which is fully functional. I know they will want Easy Populate.

sph

https://www.prom-mart.com

So how much does it cost to support the CEON mod by paying for the extended functionality versus the benefit? (Rhetorical question - no price info is supposed to be posted in the forum.)

Probably not any more than buying the Magic SEO URL (which we cannot use as names cannot end in numbers AND it completely takes over the htaccess file to the point that you really can't put anything else in there.) And keeping CEON going would be of great benefit, and once one goes with a SEO rewriter one pretty much has to keep it going. But then one is stuck with paying for a commercial mod to keep their open source zencart going.

Some here may be open source purists and avoid buying any mod (although may make donations.)

"Clients" probably don't care and want what is easiest, and I'm sure many would pop for the additional CEON upgraded mod. That cost would have to be factored into a price for the client. I'm pretty sure clients would not want CEON without the upgraded functionality.

Having Ultimate SEO as a fully functional open source alternative is also nice, I think. That is until it breaks or something.... LOL

Probably safest to stay with default dynamic urls...but clients may want pretty ones. I've got my eye on the upgraded Ultimate SEO for now. As I recall, when I tried it years ago, it was a failure...just never got it working. Seems to be working now.

sph
https://www.prom-mart.com (testing area)

creamcrackers:

Im really much more interested in

a) No Crawl errors. Simple SEO is giving me over 5000 crawl errors!

b) Good handling of EZ pages - being able to choose the URL path i want to use

As I said, I use Simple SEO on a minor site. No real problems that I know of, and although many say that seo urls are no longer important for google, my impression is that more often than not my seo url site ranks better than my dynamic url site (with the same product.)

As for b), you might be better off with CEON. Ultimate SEO, insofar as I can tell, is pretty much turn it on or off and that's it. What you see is what you get. It is on par with Prestashop, whose built-in seo urls you either turn on or off and that's about it. Ultimate and Prestashop re-write their urls very similar, leaving in the c and p id and ending with the .html extension. I believe that CEON can take all that out.

But even with CEON, I'm not sure about the EZpages, maybe depends upon what you are trying to do. I'm sure the CEON thread will have more information for you.

sph
https://www.prom-mart.com testing area

I been using Simple SEO for years now, I have over 300,000 URLs rewritten automatically. I do use EP to import products and SSEO rewrite the URL automatically.

I did have some modifications done to it to rewrite custom coded modules and so far so good.

As far as support for it, I highly doubt they will be any support in the future as it's developers are focusing on ZenMagik and building a custom shopping system like Shopify. The reason I know is I have hired them to do complete custom rewrite for my Zen Cart store. The job was suppose to take 1 month to finish but after 3.5 months nothing was being completed so I had to let them go and hire someone else to fix their work and finish the job.

I will still use some of their modules as they are very knowledgeable in Zen Cart and their modules do help in site performance however I won't be hiring them for custom work no more.

Thanks

Im using simple seo url

Ive got weird things happening like

http://www.g o g o f l o r i s t .c o m/index/dfdd

http://www.g o g o f l o r i s t .c o m/index/dfddfdsdfdf

/index/blah/blah/anything/anything

is i do /notindex/anhything doesnt work.

My shop is NOT in /index/ folder its in the root!

Very strange.
all returning my index page and heaps of duplicate content

Anything in that "folder" is returning my index page not my home page.

I dont get it.. so unless i can fix it then maybe ill go to Ceon..

Any ideas?

I clicked around on your site a bit, did not see any strange urls yet.

I assume you ARE NOT using zencart 1.5.0? I understand that Simple SEO has not been updated for that cart, and probably will not be. However, I may throw up a second 1.5 test site just to see.

Simple SEO, in my experience, requires a bit of baby sitting. Making sure new Easy Populate uploads are being properly rewritten, which means fooling with it's cache. I use the google sitemap mod to view my urls, to make sure they are properly re written (my simple seo site here):

http://www.fashion-mart.biz/sitemapproducts.xml

Google says that this site has 743 products, all indexed.

No real crawl errors other than what I have since disallowed, or products deleted. Here is an example of a crawl error:

http://www.fashion-mart.biz/language/en/precious-formals/glam-gurlz/glam-gurlz-s44215?number_of_uploads=0

But google apparently caught my site before I disabled the language/en/. So I have alot of those errors

I'm sure CEON will work, and might be able to rewrite the urls same as simple seo...so perhaps you can "take your urls with you." Just note that CEON will not rewrite existing products or Easy Populate uploads. You will have to buy the upgraded CEON mod for that, it would probably be worth it if you go to CEON. Otherwise, your rewriter would not be fully functional.

This whole seo rewriter issue shows the problem with zencart upgrades. Since seo rewriting is not yet built in to zencart, we will always have to wait and hope that the mod writers catch up. Dynamic URLs are probably safest if we're going to use zencart. But I do have my eye on Ultimate SEO URLs since it is working on my 1.5.0 test site. When I upgrade, I may use it.

sph
https://www.prommart.com

Thanks for all your help people

I think ill go with CEON

My site has 200 products

I have 2000 URLs listed in Google.

I dont want 2000 urls in Google... id like just about 300.

Does CEON take out the /category1/product1
/category2/product1 duplicate content problem?

Also... what sitemap plugin works with this?

Ive been asking Connor a lot of questions think ive annoyed him so will ask here :/

creamcrackers:

Its surprising that after SOOO many updates to ZC they havent included "SEO Urls" in it.

Why is this surprising? What tangible benefit would it offer? I've been using ZC for 8 years, have built close on 300 sites, and have yet to see a tangible, business-related benefit to URL re-writing.

Substantial monitoring of SE ranking (via an associate SEO specialist company) has yet to find any evidence that static URLS in zencart sites offer any ranking advantage over dynamic ones.

My main site is dynamic urls. I have a secondary site with the apparently defunct Simple SEO URL. I believe that there may be no ranking advantage, although awhile back it seemed that more often than not my seo site ranked higher product for product (they have same products, with my seo url site generally less text.)

But I have (or had) dynamic url products that have reached no. 1 on google. So I tend to agree that dynamic urls have no ranking disadvantage.

But I haven't noticed any disadvantage with rewritten urls.

I'm thinking of maybe getting "clients" and what if they want prettier seo urls?

And as a practical matter for myself, rewritten urls make it easier for ME to know what product the url relates to just by looking at the url.

But I think that rewritten urls are probably the most dangerous mod until if an when they become part of zencart core. And since virtually every other cart out there allows one to enable rewritten urls, is zencart running the risk of looking outdated?

Just a thought.

sph
https://www.prom-mart.com
testing area

This is one of the most heavily debated / discussed topics... not just on this forum, but on many.

As my colleague schoolboy says, there is no real advantage to using these, and if the length os the "simple SEO URL" thread is anything to go by, then they tend to cause more problems than they solve.

We went to a seminar in London recently where web marketing was under discussion. We were invited to comment on some issues, but our main reason for going was to listen.

One presenter gave an interesting talk on the BEHAVIOUR of website owners... particularly those involved in online selling and categorised as "small to medium-sized" ventures... Your typical OpenSource webcart user...

Most of his talk centred around the ATTITUDE people have towards their webshops and a key theme was the idea that MOST small business owners who have webshops constantly look for "technical quick-fixes" for what are actually practical, and usually more conventional marketing problems.

He said that these people will spend hours... days even... tinkering about with superfluous technical stuff, in the hope that it will magically deliver sales, and he used this "SEO URL" issue as an example, amongst others, of course, of what are really futile attempts at ratcheting up sales.

People should rather take that time and devote it to what actually works, he said... and surprised many people in the group when he said that there needs to be a concerted re-focus on traditional marketing and advertising... a "return to shoe-leather" he called it.

Schoolboy and I had to smile... this forum is packed full of examples of such people... they add so much rubbish to their sites; they clutter them with all kinds of pointless bells and whistles and the time all of this takes to do, shifts attention from where it is really needed... getting the message into the market.

It takes a lot of discipline to keep things in check, and to keep a site simple and streamlined.

Here are examples of big sites using at least partially re-written urls:

http://www.target.com/p/Xhilaration-Juniors-Short-Sequin-Waist-Satin-Prom-Dress-Assorted-Colors/-/A-13921985#?lnk=sc_qi_detailbutton

http://www.walmart.com/ip/Miss-Tina-Women-s-Cascade-Ruffle-V-Neck-Knit-Top/17801855

http://www1.macys.com/shop/product/london-times-dress-cap-sleeve-pleated-floral-printed?ID=652165&CategoryID=5449#fn=sp%3D1%26spc%3D1139%26ruleId%3D65%26slotId%3Drec%28)

Others such as kmart, sears, jcpenny do not.

Hi,

creamcrackers:

Does CEON take out the /category1/product1
/category2/product1 duplicate content problem?

Yes, it has full canonical URI functionality so all product pages only have one canonical URI, no matter how many categories they are linked into.

creamcrackers:

Also... what sitemap plugin works with this?

I think they all do. Ceon URI Mapping provides its URIs through a modified zen_href_link function, so any module that uses that to build links (which is any "correctly" built module) will automatically use the Ceon URI Mapping URIs.

creamcrackers:

Ive been asking Connor a lot of questions think ive annoyed him so will ask here :/

Why did you think that? I answered every question?

schoolboy:

Substantial monitoring of SE ranking (via an associate SEO specialist company) has yet to find any evidence that static URLS in zencart sites offer any ranking advantage over dynamic ones.

SEO's not my area, I've very little interest in it. However, I thought I'd comment while I'm here...

As Ceon URI Mapping (SEO)'s name indicates, it wasn't written for SEO, its primary purpose is to provide "easy to use and easy to remember" URIs which map to particular Zen Cart pages, something I think is essential for advertising particular URIs.

The SEO was added in brackets when it was found out that including keywords in URIs **does **improve SEO.

However, the difference the use of keywords in URIs makes is **tiny **compared to the important SEO factors of the page content and external links to a page.

For good SEO content is king! As most people seem to be saying here, time is much better spent getting good content onto a site.

Once you do though, having keywords in URIs should increase rankings just a tiny bit more...

If you have two identical Zen Cart sites, with identical content on every page etc., the one with keywords in its URIs (the one using static URIs) will rank higher than the one using dynamic URIs.

I've had quite a few reports of this from users of Ceon URI Mapping, and have seen it myself when hosting a site temporarily on a test domain, then moving it to its main domain, the site on the test domain ranking higher despite the only difference being its use of static URIs with keywords in them.

So, basically, my advice for better SEO is to concentrate on content and links to the site. Using static URIs will help further but will only make a small difference compared to time spent on content and external links.

Hope that is useful info for people here!

All the best..

Conor
ceon