[gbanse]

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.