[MODULE] XC SEO v1.4.0 Released for X-Cart 4.0 and 4.1
XC SEO Pro - NOW AVAILABLE!!!
Despite propaganda being spread by competitors, XCSEO doesn't cloak! PHP Site Solutions is proud to announce the release of XC SEO version 1.4.0. This release supports Apache, Zeus, and ISAPI. This release includes bug fixes, easier support for migrating from CDSEO, and once again X-Cart 4.0 is supported! XC SEO is a completely free alternative to CDSEO and DSEFU, and licensed under the GNU GPL v3 license. The purpose of XC SEO is to provide Search Engine Optimization url rewrites, to add better keyword usage to your urls, and make your urls more readable as well. A Case Study/Testimonial has been posted regarding XC SEO, feel free to check it out here: http://www.phpsitesolutions.com/x-cart_search_engine_optimization_xcseo.htm (Click on Case Studies/Testimonials) All code is versioned and available from our repository at: http://code.google.com/p/x-cart-seo/ <--- DOWNLOAD XC SEO HERE A zip of the release is available at the url provided above. This release is for X-Cart 4.0 and 4.1 ============================== Several sites using XC SEO:
If you're a user of XML Sitemaps Commercial version (http://www.xml-sitemaps.com), a good application that generates sitemap.xml files for your store, then this information is pertinent to you: Quote:
-------------------------------------- Previous XC SEO thread: http://forum.x-cart.com/showthread.php?t=37700 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- CHANGELOG Code:
XC SEO 1.4.0 (rev 60 - May 4, 2008) -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Upgrading from v1.3.0 to v1.4.0 is documented in the download Upgrade to XC SEO v1.3 from v1.2
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Re: [MODULE] XC SEO v1.4.0 Released for X-Cart 4.0 and 4.1
It's come to my attention that there is 1 simple fix that is missing for ISAPI users
This fix is ONLY needed for ISAPI users, as it will break XC SEO on other software. I'm working on an update to XC SEO to rectify this problem Open modules/XC_SEO/seo.php Find all occurrences of: PHP Code:
Replace with: PHP Code:
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Re: [MODULE] XC SEO v1.4.0 Released for X-Cart 4.0 and 4.1
I've been having trouble with how XC SEO rewrites the URLs for the sort by buttons on category pages.
On phpsitesolutions demo page for XC SEO, the sort by Product name and sort by product price links work correctly, being rewritten to look like this: Code:
http://demo.phpsitesolutions.com/cd-dvd-video-title-up-c-103.html On my site, the url looks like this: Code:
http://demo.phpsitesolutions.com/dvds-c-303sort=title.html So the sort= variable isn't getting rewritten correctly. I uploaded the XC SEO update this morning, but saw no change. |
Re: [MODULE] XC SEO v1.4.0 Released for X-Cart 4.0 and 4.1
Hi Justy, contact me via email (in my sig), i'll help you troubleshoot this issue
EDIT: I helped Justin troubleshoot the issue, turned out his navigation script was missing an & before the sort parameter (creating a broken url) Cheers |
Re: [MODULE] XC SEO v1.4.0 Released for X-Cart 4.0 and 4.1
And thanks a lot for pointing me in the right direction.
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Re: [MODULE] XC SEO v1.4.0 Released for X-Cart 4.0 and 4.1
Jon - quick question - How exactly does the "Prevent Robots from accessing duplicate content pages:" option work?
Great mod, btw! |
Re: [MODULE] XC SEO v1.4.0 Released for X-Cart 4.0 and 4.1
Thanks Ken ;-)
I'm sure you've noticed that as a regular visitor to a website using XC SEO, that the url for a product often looks similar to this: whatever-c-4-p-1-pr-6.html A url like that is passing the category id, the category page, and the product id. All X-Cart needs to function, is the product id, but the other values are passed as they determine how the breadcrumb will appear at the top of the page. So XC SEO allows these extra parameters in the url, as it's normal X-Cart functionality. The problem, though, is that to a bot, that page would look like a duplicate content page, same goes for pages that have the -print- parameter (printable pages), and there are other examples I can't think of at the moment. The "prevent bots" config item ensures that if a bot is detected, it will not see any urls with certain unneeded variables, such as -print-, ?js=n, the -c-5-p-1 bit in a product url, etc etc. Instead, it shows bots only urls that don't have those extra parameters. Additionally, if a bot tries to visit a url that a bot isn't allowed to see, they get 301 redirected to the "clean" url. If you have other questions, let me know! Cheers |
Re: [MODULE] XC SEO v1.4.0 Released for X-Cart 4.0 and 4.1
XCSEO Pro has been released - XC SEO Pro - NOW AVAILABLE!!!
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Re: [MODULE] XC SEO v1.4.0 Released for X-Cart 4.0 and 4.1
Having an odd time running this... installed without a hitch, but URLs are not being rewritten on the page. Configuration looks correct - this is not an upgrade from a prior version. Has it been tested on 4.1.10?
Thanks, |
Re: [MODULE] XC SEO v1.4.0 Released for X-Cart 4.0 and 4.1
Hi Jacob, contact me via email (in my sig), I'll help you get it running
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Re: [MODULE] XC SEO v1.4.0 Released for X-Cart 4.0 and 4.1
While I work my way through the install, can you or one of the readers tell me generally how this works, i.e. how it's doing the URL rewriting, aside from the .htaccess?
My concern is that we've done many mod installs and custom hacks all throughout our X-Cart site (me grudgingly, but the clients want what they want). Other mods have you go through a tedious list of line-by-line hacks, which at least has the benefit of showing exactly what's going on in the code so we can adjust if necessary around all the messy hacks we've already done. But I can't quite tell exactly what XC SEO will do during its install. Is there an assumption that, other than templates and other superficial customizations, the core X-Cart code is more or less the default? Any other kinds of gotchas that I should know about? In particular, they've already had me hack up a completely custom form of "SEO" URLs, but one that doesn't include actual product names in the URLs. So I'm assuming I will have to back out of that first. |
Re: [MODULE] XC SEO v1.4.0 Released for X-Cart 4.0 and 4.1
Hi Kip, XC SEO was the first X-Cart SEO module to make use of Smarty's output filter functionality (the other SEO modules at the time were tedious manual hacks to template files, php files, etc, to achieve a similar effect, but they have since decided to copy XC SEO's implementation method). Using the output filter means that manual template hacks are not needed. Before the page is output, XC SEO parses each page content for URLs that it recognizes, for Categories, Products, Manufacturers, Static Pages. When any urls are recognized, it automatically replaces each url with it's SEO'd counterpart.
While the install process doesn't require a fully stock installation, it does help to have a stock install, to ensure the patches apply properly. The patch changes only affect PHP files with fairly minor changes per file, so even if you have to manually patch, it's not as tedious as most modules. While XC SEO replaces the URLs with aliases in the final output page, the .htaccess file will remap clicked alias urls back to their intended target in X-Cart. The installer itself will insert SQL information that will add XC SEO as a module, you'll then have configuration options that you can change as needed via X-Cart General Settings for XC SEO. Additionally, XC SEO can be easily enabled/disabled as needed. |
Re: [MODULE] XC SEO v1.4.0 Released for X-Cart 4.0 and 4.1
Jon,
I've looked at your mod and installed it. One thing that troubled me was the fact that it does a query for every single URL rewrite. Usually the same query over and over again. For example: Select category from xcart_categories WHERE categoryid='505'; To fix this, I simply added a &title= . urlencode(seo_title_of_product_or_category_name) to all of my urls (in appropriate products.tpl (or in my case, products_t.tpl) file, subcategories.tpl, categories.tpl, and a few misc others). Then, in your code I before the query I added: Code:
if (!empty($options['title'])){ I also had to unset title from the _category_callback and _product_callback functions to remove ?title= from the URL: Code:
function _category_callback($found, $uri_only = false, $title = false) { This saved about 30 - 50+ queries per page. I am using memcache and it still sped things up significantly. |
Re: [MODULE] XC SEO v1.4.0 Released for X-Cart 4.0 and 4.1
Hi Mike, nice change. I've actually implemented query result caching in XCSEO Pro to avoid situations with the same data being fetched repeatedly. I'm also investigating other improvements, such as building an array of all urls that need replacing, and build one-time queries that would fetch data for everything that needs to be replaced.
Any improvements that I come up with in Pro, that can be backported to basic, I'll backport. BTW, while your method definitely improves performance, I do prefer to avoid having to edit template files. I've found users often have their skins replaced, or add mods that replace changes that have already been implemented, etc, more so with tpl files than php files. While you're a savvy user, and obviously know your way around code, most users aren't, so XC SEO basic is aimed at the "lowest common denominator", in this case. But I appreciate your feedback, and I'll keep it in mind when making other changes to improve performance :-) Ideally, I'd rather modify the function in X-Cart that pulls back product data, to cache that data to be globally accessible, same for categories, etc. There are multiple occasions when X-Cart itself queries more than once for the same dataset, and having that info cached already would be nice. Maybe I could develop that as a separate performance patch (would have to weigh the memory use against the benefit of less queries), and have XC SEO check for the existence of that performance patch, as an added optional speed boost. EDIT: just as a note, I've worked on proprietary code before, that functions as a cache class. You could flag cache data as session based or persistent, and if persistent & memcache is available, the persistent data would be stored in memcache. That would be nice to have developed for X-Cart |
Re: [MODULE] XC SEO v1.4.0 Released for X-Cart 4.0 and 4.1
Hi jon,i use XC SEO v1.3.0 but the Product rating star can not show ,it's my website problem ? V1.4.0 alredy fix this problem ?
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Re: [MODULE] XC SEO v1.4.0 Released for X-Cart 4.0 and 4.1
Hi Ken, contact me via email (in my sig), we'll figure out what's going on :-)
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Re: [MODULE] XC SEO v1.4.0 Released for X-Cart 4.0 and 4.1
Any idea how to get XML Sitemap Generator to generate all the files site map XML etc .... there is no html files to be found in my XC ... http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/
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Re: [MODULE] XC SEO v1.4.0 Released for X-Cart 4.0 and 4.1
Greetings! Does anyone know or have experience with XC SEO 1.3.0 correctly rewriting product pages, but not category pages. The links to category pages are bringing up a 404. Could it possibly be from using BCS Category Meta Titles? Thanks!
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Re: [MODULE] XC SEO v1.4.0 Released for X-Cart 4.0 and 4.1
Hi Lingerieblowout, I've sent you a PM to see if I can help you figure out the problem you're experiencing.
Auren, contact me via my email (in my sig), with your website URL, I'll see if I can help you troubleshoot. Cheers |
Re: [MODULE] XC SEO v1.4.0 Released for X-Cart 4.0 and 4.1
John, my associate Gary tells me he sent you a few emails during the last week about this, without reply. We're working on the same project. He's sending again right now. Thanks!
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Re: [MODULE] XC SEO v1.4.0 Released for X-Cart 4.0 and 4.1
Hi Auren, I haven't seen any emails about this issue, I'll dig through my email to find what's going on. I'll be in touch!
Cheers |
Re: [MODULE] XC SEO v1.4.0 Released for X-Cart 4.0 and 4.1
He said he has sent 6 or 7 emails to you over the last few weeks, including May 24th, and all have gone unanswered.
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Re: [MODULE] XC SEO v1.4.0 Released for X-Cart 4.0 and 4.1
Hi Auren, I was unable to search for his emails this weekend, I've been extremely busy with multiple projects.
Anywho, I just found his emails, I've reponded, I'll wait to hear back. |
Re: [MODULE] XC SEO v1.4.0 Released for X-Cart 4.0 and 4.1
Quote:
Lingerie Blow Out, did you get this to work? I have just had cdseo pro installed and genberated an xml sitemap ok. |
Re: [MODULE] XC SEO v1.4.0 Released for X-Cart 4.0 and 4.1
LingerieBlowout ended up going with DSEFU before I was able to assist them.
XCSEO, both Basic and Pro, works fine with XML Sitemaps, so the issue was likely a misconfiguration somewhere. |
Re: [MODULE] XC SEO v1.4.0 Released for X-Cart 4.0 and 4.1
Hi Jon,
first thanks a bunch for a great mod ! I have a question regarding the bot functionnality. You say that XC SEO redirects bots to pages without those extra parameters . Does that mean that product pages that contain the product name in the url along with those variable will not get indexed ? In that case how do we make sure that the product pages and other pages are indexed by the bots ? Thank you ! http://waxonwaxoff.ca Your canadian car care supplier ! Quote:
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Re: [MODULE] XC SEO v1.4.0 Released for X-Cart 4.0 and 4.1
To explain better:
this-is-my-product-pr-54.html this-is-my-product-pr-54.html?js=Y this-is-my-product-print-pr-54.html this-is-my-product-print-pr-54.html?js=Y Okay, the 4 above URLs, all go to the same page. The 1st url is considered the *primary* url, has the least fluff in the URL. There are uses for all 4 URL versions though, so each url is active in X-Cart. To avoid duplicate content issues, whenever a bot is detected, only the 1st URL is displayed anywhere to the bot. If the bot tries to visit urls 2, 3 or 4, it gets redirected to url 1. Any urls the bot sees on the page that would normally link to 1,2,3,4, will all instead just display url 1. So the point is to strip out the known extra parameters that are useless. Some others incorrectly call this cloaking, but it's not. You can read about cloaking here: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66355 The reason why this method works, and has worked for 2-3 years now with no ill effects on Google rankings, is because the actual page content is the same for all variations of a link. So the only "change" when Google visits, is reducing the multiple URLs, to a single URL. Google is smart enough to see that every page has the same content, and so it has not penalized any websites running XCSEO, that I've ever seen. What's actually interesting, is that I've had users report a definite increase in page rank, when leaving another SEO module, to use XCSEO Basic. Just a note, XCSEO Pro handles it's urls in a different manner, and does not react to search engines in any way. It's a different approach from XCSEO Basic, and I don't want anyone confusing the two. Cheers |
Re: [MODULE] XC SEO v1.4.0 Released for X-Cart 4.0 and 4.1
I'm sorry but seems like I've found bug in XC SEO mod:
/modules/xc_seo/outputfilter.seo.php, line 408 Code:
function _insert_href_title($found){ There must be strpos($found, ' title=') in condition, you are entangled haystack and needle in strpos function. This caused unnecessary second "title" attribute in Code:
<area shape="poly" coords="424,239,509,239,509,357,424,357,424,239" href="http://www.mtechuk.com/testshop/welding-c-19.html" title="Welding" alt="Welding" title="Welding" /> After we changed haystack and needle in strpos function we got correct output HTML. |
Re: [MODULE] XC SEO v1.4.0 Released for X-Cart 4.0 and 4.1
Yes this is still not fixed. Replace "strpos" with "eregi"
See this http://forum.x-cart.com/showthread.php?t=37346 |
Re: [MODULE] XC SEO v1.4.0 Released for X-Cart 4.0 and 4.1
Quote:
I don't think that it is good idea because any regular expressions works very slowly than strpos. Therefore more better solution is change strpos( ' title=', $found) to strpos($found, ' title=') crossposted in http://forum.x-cart.com/showthread.php?p=218938#post218938 |
Re: [MODULE] XC SEO v1.4.0 Released for X-Cart 4.0 and 4.1
Doh, coulda sworn I had already fixed that in the source. I just now committed the change to SVN, thanks for the bug report guys.
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Re: [MODULE] XC SEO v1.4.0 Released for X-Cart 4.0 and 4.1
Thanks Holub
I've modified the file per your post |
Re: [MODULE] XC SEO v1.4.0 Released for X-Cart 4.0 and 4.1
Quote:
is there any way we can redirect them to the new. regards Junaid |
Re: [MODULE] XC SEO v1.4.0 Released for X-Cart 4.0 and 4.1
Hi Junaid, thanks for your question.
XCSEO Basic properly 301 redirects old URLs for you, so you do not have any 404 errors, and you will not have to manually redirect any old pages. Cheers |
Re: [MODULE] XC SEO v1.4.0 Released for X-Cart 4.0 and 4.1
testing 1.4 with 4.1.10 and getting <!-- URLs Rewritten by XC SEO v1.4.0 - created by PHP Site Solutions - http://www.phpsitesolutions.com -->PHP_EOL</body>
This is showing PHP_EOL on the mainpage. Assuming this is a new bug? |
Re: [MODULE] XC SEO v1.4.0 Released for X-Cart 4.0 and 4.1
Thanks Jon for great product for novice like me. Very easy to install, but i noticed after the install that my splash page no longer comes up when i go to my site, and directly lands me to my home page. I was wondering what i would have to do to get it back. Thank you.
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Re: [MODULE] XC SEO v1.4.0 Released for X-Cart 4.0 and 4.1
Problems again...
While I've gotten XC SEO basic working for all http:// urls, any https:// url fails with a file not found. I notice that Cape Fear Styles website works correctly for both http:// and https:// urls. I'll be PM Jon as well. |
Re: [MODULE] XC SEO v1.4.0 Released for X-Cart 4.0 and 4.1
Has anyone successfully installed XC SEO 1.4.0 rev 60 - May 4, 2008 with X-Cart version 4.1.2? Does anyone know why the patch for 'froogle.php' and 'get_language.php' did not patch successfully?
When attempting to apply the patch 'xcseo_41.patch' with X-Cart version 4.1.2, the following information was returned: Step 1 of 2: Testing patch applicability and generation list of files Result of the testing phase.. auth.php OK modules/Froogle/froogle.php could not patch https.php OK include/install.php OK include/get_language.php could not patch |
Re: [MODULE] XC SEO v1.4.0 Released for X-Cart 4.0 and 4.1
It is quite typical for patches not to run automatically, particularly with such old and unstable versions of x-cart.
You just have to manually patch those files. If you are not using froogle from within x-cart, you don't need to worry about that file anyway. |
Re: [MODULE] XC SEO v1.4.0 Released for X-Cart 4.0 and 4.1
Thanks for that Paul. I won't be using Froogle, so that is one thing less to worry about.
Is there a tutorial on the forums for manual patching? |
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