.html vs /
 

I know this has probably been answered before, but there has to be something done to the SEO Friendly URLs in X-Cart 5. Please forgive me if this has been answered:

This is not the way to go: http://yourwebsite/product.html
This is the way to go: http://yourwebsite/product/

Furthermore for product tabs that look like this: http:/yourwebsite/product.html#product-details-tab-description

Should look something like this: http:/yourwebsite/product/description/

Please tell me this is fixed and we can have modern 2017 URL names like every other website for the past 5-years.

Once again...please forgive me if this has been solved!

Re: .html vs /
 

Why is it that product page will be /product instead of /product.html ?

Usually the .html indicates this is a "file" and / indicates it is "directory"

I know WP allows for either one but not sure why do you think .html is wrong?

Re: .html vs /
 

Not wrong...Outdated. Go to any modern website like Apple.com and you will not see .html. It's about. Being more professional and the less the characters when linking to YouTube or Facebook the better.

Re: .html vs /
 

Hm I don't really pay attention to this. But again /product will tell me there is more inside while product.html will tell me it is last link in the chain.

https://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msusa/en_US/pdp/Dell-Inspiron-13-i5368-10024GRY-Signature-Edition-2-i...00474_02192017

http://www.apple.com/shop/buy-watch/apple-watch-nike/space-gray-aluminum-black-cool-grey-sport-band?preSel.../A&step=detail

How are these any simpler or better without the .html? No one will type them in anyway. I guess it is a matter of personal preference. QT can probably modify the clean urls module to give cart user a choice.

Not to paste in here an url from Amazon - it is about 10000 characters long.... :)

Re: .html vs /
 

I use .html and name my main product pages so they are located in the root directory. It may no longer be true but in the past I always heard that Google put more weight on pages the closer to the root they were.

mysite.com/product-1.html
mysite.com/product-2.html

My brother-in-law uses pages as folders and I always thought I may have a slight advantage over sites doing this as maybe they were looked at as being pushed down a directory. I don't know if there is any validity to this or not.

mysite.com/product-1/
mysite.com/product-2/

What I can say based on my ranking improvement is that I'm sticking with my game plan.

Attachment 4845

These are just my thoughts and I very much welcome other viewpoints!

Paul

Re: .html vs /
 

Well I would, at least, request cleaner URLs. Stuff like this with the Tabs is just too much:

http://gospelmusicians.com/real-deal.html?category_id=12
http://gospelmusicians.com/pure-synth.html#product-details-tab-description

I wouldn't mind the .html, if everything else was cleaner.

Re: .html vs /
 

I agree and sorry I can't help you there... I'm using X-CART 4 with CDSEO Pro so I have complete control of everything.

Re: .html vs /
 

The url with the query parameter - I believe this was discussed before in the forum here. Can't find the post now but I am pretty sure it was mentioned. I find it not so clean url too. XC explanation was the categoryid was needed so to do proper redirect back or something like this. I agree - this shouldn't be there. The url will work without it though so if need to post it anywhere you can omit it.

Re: .html vs /
 

Our XC store is both small and simple compared to some of the stores on here, however.... Simple edits of the XC XML Sitemap Module settings achieve our chosen/desired url displays. FWIW: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/50440624/Z-Forum/XML%20Sitemap%20-%20General.png

At category level, only the category name is displayed after the domain /
At sub-category level, quite sensibly and logically, only the the category then sub-category names are displayed after the domain /
Once any individual product is selected, only the product name (i.e. seo-friendly name.html) is displayed after the domain /

Just like these alternative (simple) versions of @hartwellj previous post, but all our urls are https:// prefix by default with auto re-direct for http://

http://gospelmusicians.com/pure-synth.html and http://gospelmusicians.com/pure-synth.html

With this setup, category and sub-category names are never part of a specific product url, but active breadcrumb links are there if people are lost... As @hartwellj has posted, it turns into a longwinded url if any tabs (custom or otherwise) are desired within the reference url, instead of only the default main description tab...so we don't use these :wink:

We're a specialised supplier, we're not looking for the SEO Holy Grail and we don't participate in online advertising (google etc) which will be quite different than the approach taken by others, but this works okay us and these settings are part of a default XC5 install anyway, so can be setup to suit.

Re: .html vs /
 

1. Your product located in several categories. category_id=12 is needed to build the correct breadcrumbs path. However, to make it SEO friendly, we use "canonical URL" meta tag to show Google the original page to prevent Google to mark the page as it has "duplicate content" :



2.
vs

We use "#" especially. It allows us to prevent any duplicate content marker for the page. Google index all the content of the page, even it is shown in the tab only (since it loaded into the page source). But http:/yourwebsite/product/description/ is the new URL and Google can mark it with duplicate content if you show any similar information from the http:/yourwebsite/product.html page.