Product URLs (again)
 

Hola,
I've been playing around with using the Google Sitemap generator and noted that it choked on the long URLs like this:

/product.php?productid=16276&cat=259&page=1

In thinking about this a bit I wondered if the cart actually needed to know the category and page number so I trimmed the URL down to:

/product.php?productid=16276

and found it worked fine.

Now I can see a very easy way to generate URLs for the Google Sitemap generator configuration file by simply querying the database for the products and then tacking that info onto the URL in the XML format the config file uses.

Am I overlooking something?

If there are no major issues here, why shouldn't I be able to modify the X-Cart code so that whenever the cart points to a product page is drops all of the extraneous parameters? I get the feeling this is way too simple...

Hey Gregg...actually, if you want to take a major step forward in SEO, I'd have this mod installed:

http://www.safetynetweb.com/Dynamic-Search-Engine-Friendly-URLs-pr-1.html

Hey Padraic,
Thanks for the reply.

I saw that mod. I'm wondering how bad the hit in traffic would be to make the switch now.

I tested the URL strings for the products and asked the X-Cart team about them. The reason I got started down this path in the first place was because the Google Sitemap generator script choked on the product URLs.

I tried the URLs without the cat and page and the product came up fine. The X-Cart team says there is no problem accessing a product page in this fashion. The only drawback is that the referring category and page information would be lost. Which - of course - got me to thinking that these could be carried in a session var rather than passed on the URL.

To test how well Googlebot like the new URLs I created a list of about 20 pages without the additional vars and submitted the sitemap to Google. It doesn't seem to have made much of a difference so I suspect we need to make the cart more SE friendly.

You would probably take a hit to start by implementing the mod, but it would be a significant improvement in the long run. Maybe wait till after the holidays to plug it in?

That's what I was thinking.