Forum Moderators: buckworks
I've got a site that I've been running Interchange on for about 3 years, but it doesn't seem to index very well. What I need is your opinions as to what is the best/most friendly package that indexs well. I'm open to all suggestions and please let me know why you think that some are better than others.
Thanks!
There will be no problems with litecommerce or x-cart which will generate an html catalog. You can also look at Actinic which is totally html.
[edited by: derekwong28 at 4:56 pm (utc) on Mar. 19, 2004]
Interchange can be made *very* serach engine friendly. I have built many sites that look just like static sites but are in fact huge database driven websites.
It's also robot (spider) aware and will turn off session handling to stop duplicate pages making their way into the SERPS.
The freedom of feature implementation in Interchange is unsurpassed. You can database drive meta fields, titles and headings etc. Small tweaks can easily be made without having to edit loads of HTML pages. If you wanted to you could even serve up different pages to different spiders, although this would be unethical.
You need to make sure you have at least Interchange version 4.9 (it's spider aware) or above and really you need to use Interchange Actionmaps so you don't have to pass cgi parameters.
Actionmaps allow:
[domain.com...]
instead of:
[domain.com...]
Sticky me if you want to see some URLs.
Ian
The key is to get it to hide the session key and "page count" from the URL when a spider comes around. The spider-aware code introduced in 4.9 does that. However, I don't think it's very easy to back-port it to earlier versions of Interchange without several hours of developer time.
Migrating to a newer version of Interchange is not dead simple, either, but it's mostly a case of installing the new version in another directory, then running it in parallel to your old one while you debug the catalog. More like a couple hours of plodding work, versus reverse-and-re-engineering.
The main documentation on the new RobotUA directive is here:
[icdevgroup.org...]
Having seen your site the first thing to do, and perhaps the most important is to get rid of the cgi-bin/cart in the URL. Do this using modrewrite.
However, here's the gun to shoot your foot with ;-)
The following lines added to your catalog.cfg will suppress URL session IDs and mv_pc page counts:
ScratchDefault mv_add_dot_html 1
ScratchDefault mv_no_session_id 1
ScratchDefault mv_no_count 1
But in my experience Interchange will still fail back to using URL session IDs if it can't set a cookie, even with the above parameters set. I think this is a bug in Interchange because, according to the documentation, that's not supposed to happen. I've found that the following hack to lib/Vend/Util.pm does the trick:
Find the function vendUrl, and scroll down until you find this line:
push @parms, "$::VN->{mv_session_id}=$id" if $id;
Comment it out. Then go down one more to find this line:
push @parms, "$::VN->{mv_pc}=$ct" if $ct;
And comment that one out, too. Save the file and restart Interchange, and your store will continue to track sessions if cookies are enabled, but under no circumstances will it put session IDs or page counts in the URL.
As for using mod_rewrite, I don't recommend it, either. You're better off using mod_interchange, which actually removes overhead rather than adding it. With mod_interchange you can have a URL like:
[example.com...]
Instead of:
[example.com...]
or
[example.com...]
Kevin Walsh says he even has an experimental version of mod_interchange that lets you serve straight from the root URL, like:
[example.com...] <-- Interchange page.
It's bad idea to overide a patch to the core. If you want to you can overide a sub in the config.
Adding: push @parms, "$::VN->{mv_pc}=$ct" if $ct;
Will cause havoc - it won't allow anyone with cookies disabled to add products to the basket. You'd be suprised how many privacy freaks there are out there with cookies diabled!
mod_interchange, yeah fair enough although it doesn't work with Apache 2. We have sites doing 30,000 plus uniques a day on a 3 year old server. They all use mod_rewrite to give:
[example.com...]
We havn't seen any problems from doing this.
I use the hack on two sites to disable session IDs and page counts for everybody, but neither of them use the shopping-cart functions of Interchange. Both are content sites that are serving AdSense, and when the URLs are forced to be unique it confuses Google. The result is that all your pages start delivering charity ads instead of the, ahem, more profitable ones ;-)
