oscommerce seo-g issue

[pharmaheidi]

we are having issues with serps since migrating to osc and the other day I saw slurp crawling our cpaths not the seo urls so I am thinking there is something wack with the custom write of the urls or htaccess or some mod rewrites issue.

Problem is I dont want to change url structure much especially for top categories as we have PR on a lot of them and i find 301s are not always 100% for passing that stuff. I do not have a problem with changing the urls for deeper pages however provided we can get redirects in place etc.

I know that we need to change _ to / for the subcats etc. However I believe that that is only part of the problem. Does anybody have any advice for me? You can take a look at the site [247-pharmacy.com...] and let me know if you need any other info. Any input from some oscommerce experts would be greatly appreciated. I must be missing something!

[incrediBILL]

slurp crawling our cpaths

Perhaps you forgot to tell slurp (and all the rest) not to do that with robots.txt

[enigma1]

The default SEO-G with the version you have, I believe 1.20, will not redirect automatically if there is a page access with cpath, products_id or other parameter the module handles.

Typically everything that goes through the tep_href_link will pass through the translation of SEO-G. By default if all the parameters can be translated the module will generate the friendly link. Otherwise it won't.

However I see you flipped the SEO-G Safe Mode to false that's not a good thing unless you know exactly what you're doing. It means now, the module will try to generate and store URLs regardless of parameters passed. Switch that to true as it was originally.

The stock osc exposes the buy now buttons in product listing pages as urls unfortunately. These urls may contain the cpath among other things. You need to change the behavior and deploy the buy now buttons in a different way eg: post forms, so spiders cannot index them (they will get redirected anyways). Same goes for the sort-by headings in the listings. Deploy drop-downs so they aren't visible to spiders.

About the underscore to forward slash change you do that later when you get around the current problems. Basically your store's structure must be very consistent before changing to the / separator. In other words every single request for link generation that goes through the tep_href_link function must include a proper set of parameters otherwise you will end up with duplicates (eg products_id=1&cPath=2 and products_id=1 will cause duplicates if some other script does that). And your store right now combines the linking of products_id and cpath at least from what I see. That's also a problem because it may generate duplicated URLs. Set the linkage from the admin->SEO-G->G-Types so it is different for each parameter to get around this problem until you fix everything else. There is detauled explanation in the readme how to configure it.

Once you do the changes, from your admin reports page clear up the recorded urls. The module will rebuild them.

[pharmaheidi]

Would like to thank Enigma1 for his help and highly recommend him for anybody having OSCommerce related issues. He knows this stuff inside out and that's hard to come by!