PR and ecommerce

[whereditgo]

I have searched and I guess, I just don't know what to search on because nothing relevent comes up. So forgive me if this has already been asked. I have an online store and of course with the dynamic url's it is a little hard to get the products indexed and get page rank. My question is, does it really matter? I've seen some sites not want to link to anyone below a pr4, does that included the online store part as well as the store front. I ask this because, I just spent a lot of money (to me anyway) making miva search engine friendly, to have my web person move me to oscommerce, where I have to start this SEO all over. I love the site he's built for me, so I'm not arguing too much with him, but I just want to know is it really worth it to shorten the url's? Any info is greatly appreciated. Again, I appologize if this has already been asked, but I just can't seem to find the answer I need.

Thanks

[somerset]

I can only speak from my own experience promoting two oscommerce sites from scratch.

I have found that the greater the PR, the more it seems to 'push' page rank through to the dynamic url pages. But even this only gains a PR on the first level pages (e.g. default.php?cPath=22), when you drill down to a page address such as:

product_info.php?manufacturers_id=44&products_id=993

there seems to be no way to gain any visible PR. Maybe it's because there are 2 sets of variables in the example case.

In retrospect, I wish the site had mod rewrite applied prior to going live. Comparing to other (not oscommerce) sites where mod rewrite was applied, ALL of the pages were quickly spidered and gained PR.

So, you have a difficult choice. Your site can still work well with out mod rewrite, but if you are going to make a living off it ...

Make your mind up before going live.

PS: I've not specifically looked, but have yet to see an oscommerce site with full mod rewrite applied. I would really appreciate seeing an example if someone can sticky me one.

[whereditgo]

Thanks for replying.
I had wanted to do a mod rewrite with miva, but my current host does not support it. I was thinking about changing to a host that does. But before I went through all this, and seo again, I wanted to make sure it was worth it in the end.
I read that you can turn search engine friendly urls on in the control panel as long as mod rewrite is supported. Does anyone have any experience with this, and does it work? Also is there a way to check what hosts do support this without calling every one of them on the internet and asking.
I agree about not going live until I am comfortable with everything. I have about 200 prods. so it is going to be a little while anyway.
I don't want to sound rude, because I'm not, but please, this is not an invite for the world to email me about hosting companies they own or are an affiliate of :).

Thanks again

[derekwong28]

If you are wondering whether SEO is worth it, the answer would certainly be yes, even if it costs up to $20,000 as the cost will be recovered. However, there are much cheaper ways of doing it if you know how to do it.

There is a third party module for MIVA and probably OS Commerce for generating an html catalog.

However, the ones I really prefer would be that for the x-cart and litecommerce,

I do not think long html urls are that important in ranking, Being able to insert your keywords in your title metatag is much more important.

[whereditgo]

I saw how to insert meta tags and keywords at the oscommerce site and was planning on doing this. I just didn't know if shortening the url's was important or not. It was a pain to get it done in miva, so I was wondering if it was necessary or not. But it seems like a mod rewrite will take care of it, I hope anyway, I just have to figure out how to do it, since it seems to be necessary. The one thing I liked about one of the miva modules I purchased, was that it automatically generated the titles and meta tags for each product and page. Now if I could just figure out an easy approach for that in oscommerce, I'd have it made ;).

Thanks

[derekwong28]

I have got massively long html urls and they all rank very highly. However, I cannot comment on dynamic urls

[Raymond]

None of my dynamic URL have received any PR. My main pages with no "?id=123&cat=whatever" did receive normal PR. Google still indexed my the whole 1000+ pages though, it just doesn't give any PR to the dynamic pages.

[derekwong28]

My impression is that php pages will get PR, whereas I have not seen it with asp, mv or clickcartpro pages. Until Google updates its technology, I would only recommend a php/mysql combination. Better still, a cart that can generate an html catalog.

Raymond, you could be missing a massive amount of much traffic. You should either get a html catalog generator, or switch to a different cart entirely. It would be too tedious to code your own landing pages for all your products.

High PR on inner pages is absolutely essential. Some carts do a better job at filtering it down to the inner pages than others. We use to code all our html pages. However, I am now very satisfied with the catalog generated by litecommerce. Our homepage has a PR of 6, most of the category pages retain a PR of 6. Almost all our inner pages are at PR5. This is sufficient to put most of our products within the first page of Google results.

[Raymond]

Derek, thanks for the advice.
Problem is I wrote the whole backend system myself. It works with my own inventory and order database. It does my accounting and it takes care of inventory updates and other stuff. It is very hard for me to just change to a third party software now.

It really blows that many of my dynamic pages are "supposed" to receive a PR4, which i heard would do wonder to the PR rating for my main page (because all of them are pointing back to the main page), but currently they have PR0. I have already shortened all querystrings, but it seems like google still doesn't give any PR rating to them.

Maybe I can switch to PHP for some of the dynamic pages and see if it does any changes to the PR.

[whereditgo]

I am so new to all of this obviously, but what is php/mysql? I know oscommerce is php, and with mod rewrite can get rid of the? and id=. So now I am on the hunt for a server that supports this. Will make it top priority today. You'd think with the price I pay for service every month, they would support it.
Oh well,
Cyndi

[bsnrjones]

For those of you using OsCommerce, you really need to check out a contribtution called YASU. It is available from the OsCommerce site in the contributions area.

This mod rewrites the urls to show the category name, and product name.

I have had it installed for about 3 weeks, and so far it is really helping my rankings on those pages that have been spidered.

[somerset]

I did finally come across an example of OSCommerce fully mod rewritten. Its only a recent site, and is only just starting to build PR, but already - amazingly, although the home page has only a PR of 3, already EVEN THE END PRODUCT PAGES have inherited some PR - you would not see that on an OSCommerce site with usual dynamic url's.

Usually you have to get a heap of PR only to get PR on the first level pages, this example with a low PR already has got some PR all the way to the end product pages. Once this site owner realises what to do, his site will do very well indeed.

Sticky me to see the example, It is nothing to do with me.

Further digging around has helped me to find a web company offering to step in and apply mod rewrite for a standard rate of 199 GBP one-off - impressive. This would set you off running!