X-Cart forums

[Acquamarina]

Hi, Jon,

Having a few issues with the search engines:

- Manufacturers.php is not included in CDSEO url's so I can't customize any metatag;

- Both Google and Bing are still picking up the same page with and without the trailing slashes, causing duplicate content warning;

- Pages with sessions for some (not all) products are appearing as duplicate content on Google and Bing;

- Some pop-up image (Detailed Image) pages are being indexed with the same meta tags as the whole site causing duplicate meta tag warnings;

- In Google there are 362 pages leading to 404 errors. These have had their url modified in text or by removing the html extension and adding a trailing slash. Some are categories that went from .html to just /. Some are the category or manufacturer pages plus an extension, for example "necklaces-pendants/index4.html?js=n" What would be the recommended way to handle these redirects? The pages do exist but their url's changed after we went from the 4.1.9 version to 4.4.5 and upgraded CDSEO.

This is our robots.txt, maybe something is missing.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /*printable=Y
Disallow: /*js=*
Disallow: /*sort=*
Disallow: /*sort_direction=*
Disallow: /product.php*
Disallow: /home.php?cat=*
Disallow: /catalog/
Disallow: /search.php
Disallow: /cart.php
Disallow: /help.php
Disallow: /giftcert.php
Disallow: /product.php
Disallow: /orders.php
Disallow: /register.php
Disallow: /icon.php
Disallow: /image.php
Disallow: /error_message.php
Disallow: /offers.php
Disallow: /product_image.php

Thank you very much for your help!

[gadgetinfinity]

Dear Jon,

I renew my product title from time to time to best match the compatible models. But it seems that the CDSEO pro does not replace my urls, page titles, link titles, etc. although I have all enabled them in the set up page - replacement toggles. I have read the knowledge base and checked with my server and found no error you mentioned in the smarty tags. How do I fix it?

Best regards,
Henry

[Jon]

Originally Posted by gadgetinfinity

Dear Jon,

I renew my product title from time to time to best match the compatible models. But it seems that the CDSEO pro does not replace my urls, page titles, link titles, etc. although I have all enabled them in the set up page - replacement toggles. I have read the knowledge base and checked with my server and found no error you mentioned in the smarty tags. How do I fix it?

Best regards,
Henry

When you change your product title, you will have to specifically change the SEO information in CDSEO. We don't dynamically change SEO information when the product title changes, or it can cause serious SEO problems.

[Jon]

Manufacturers.php is not included in CDSEO url's so I can't customize any metatag;

You would have to manually customize this page. It doesn't have an associated ID so isn't done in CDSEO.

Both Google and Bing are still picking up the same page with and without the trailing slashes, causing duplicate content warning;

See this tutorial for assistance:
http://www.websitecm.com/articles/x-cart-seo/x-cart-seo-urls-dont-slash-away-your-x-cart-seo-rankings/

Pages with sessions for some (not all) products are appearing as duplicate content on Google and Bing;

CDSEO's use of the canonical link tag should prevent this. It may just be a matter of time before these are flushed out of the indexes but you'll want to keep an eye on them.

Some pop-up image (Detailed Image) pages are being indexed with the same meta tags as the whole site causing duplicate meta tag warnings;

Whatever url these are being generated from (presumably popup_image.php) should be blocked in robots.txt. If you just recently added that robots.txt file it will take some time (especially with Bing) before they are deindexed.

In Google there are 362 pages leading to 404 errors. These have had their url modified in text or by removing the html extension and adding a trailing slash. Some are categories that went from .html to just /. Some are the category or manufacturer pages plus an extension, for example "necklaces-pendants/index4.html?js=n" What would be the recommended way to handle these redirects? The pages do exist but their url's changed after we went from the 4.1.9 version to 4.4.5 and upgraded CDSEO.

If you've changed the urls and not used the CDSEO interface to do so, you'll have to specify 301 redirects in .htaccess:

Redirect 301 /old-url.html http://www.example.com/new-url/

[Acquamarina]

Hi, Jon,

I did use CDSEO to redirect the url's. They seem to be dropping off now, though.

Not sure how to add the manufacturer pages to CDSEO. Is there a tutorial or instructions you can point me to, please?

Thanks again!

[Jon]

Here's a tutorial using the contact page as an example which can be modified for manufacturers: https://www.websitecm.com/support/default_import/Knowledgebase/Article/View/55/0/how-do-i-rewrite-contact-...-friendly-urls

[ecollier2012]

HELP!

Implemented CDSEO on May 14th and since then sales and traffic to the site have plummeted starting on the 15th. Google webbaster tools show that our search impressions dropped by 75% in just a few days

Were at a loss as to why..What can cause this - URL rewrites, the sitemap, new robots.txt, etc

Is is possible to back CDSEO out gracefully? If so how?


Here is the .htaccess...

.htaccess
DirectoryIndex home.php index.php index.html index.htm

# If you would like X-Cart to show informative message for errors caused
# by opening of missing/deleted files (HTTP Error 404), please uncomment
# the line below.
# ErrorDocument 404 /404.php

# NOTE: If you installed X-Cart into a subfolder (for example, to /store folder, so
# it is available at http://www.example.com/store/home.php), you need to specify
# full relative path to the 404.php script, for example, as follows:
# ErrorDocument 404 /store/404.php

# Show default error document for 404 errors caused by opening of image/media files.
<Files ~ "\.(gif|jpe?g|png|js|css|swf|ico)$">
ErrorDocument 404 default
</Files>

ErrorDocument 401 default

# ------------------------------------
# CDSEO Pro
# ------------------------------------
# This directory index is recommended to replace the
# x-cart default within this .htaccess file
DirectoryIndex home.php index.html index.php

# Enable mod rewrite engine
RewriteEngine On

# .htpasswd protection
# May be required if your htpasswd files are located below document root (i.e. cpanel)
# Remove # at the beginning of this line if your unable to access password protected folders:
ErrorDocument 401 "Unauthorized"

# Some servers require this Options directive to be disabled
# Remove # at the beginning of this line to disable:
#Options -Multiviews

# Some servers require the Rewritebase directive to be enabled
# Remove # at the beginning of this line to enable:
#RewriteBase /xcart/

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/(payment|admin|provider|partner)/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !\.(gif|jpe?g|png|js|css|swf|php|ico)$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-l
RewriteRule ^(.+)$ cdseopro.php
# ------------------------------------
# / CDSEO Pro
# ------------------------------------




Here is the robots.txt in place now...below is the one that was installed by CDSEO...


User-agent: *
Disallow: /administrator/
Disallow: /cache/
Disallow: /components/
Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /includes/
Disallow: /installation/
Disallow: /language/
Disallow: /libraries/
Disallow: /media/
Disallow: /modules/
Disallow: /plugins/
Disallow: /templates/
Disallow: /tmp/
Disallow: /xmlrpc/



robots.txt from CDSEO install....backed it out recently just in case it was the issue...

User-agent: *
Disallow: /administrator/
Disallow: /cache/
Disallow: /components/
Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /includes/
Disallow: /installation/
Disallow: /language/
Disallow: /libraries/
Disallow: /media/
Disallow: /modules/
Disallow: /plugins/
Disallow: /templates/
Disallow: /tmp/
Disallow: /xmlrpc/
Disallow: /xcart/*printable=Y
Disallow: /xcart/*js=*
Disallow: /xcart/*sort=*
Disallow: /xcart/*sort_direction=*
Disallow: /xcart/product.php*
Disallow: /xcart/home.php?cat=*
Disallow: /xcart/catalog/
Disallow: /xcart/search.php
Disallow: /xcart/cart.php
Disallow: /xcart/help.php
Disallow: /xcart/giftcert.php
Disallow: /xcart/product.php
Disallow: /xcart/orders.php
Disallow: /xcart/register.php
Disallow: /xcart/icon.php
Disallow: /xcart/image.php
Disallow: /xcart/error_message.php
Disallow: /xcart/offers.php
Disallow: /xcart/product_image.php
Sitemap: http://www.tvrepairkits.com/xcart/sitemap.xml
Sitemap: http://www.tvrepairkits.com/xcart/sitemap.xml.gz

[ecollier2012]

Second question....


We recently purchased and implemented CDSEO hoping that the cannocical URL feature would overcome duplicate content errors from google but it seems that either its not configured correctly on our end or its not possible the way our short and long descriptions are setup.

Basically is there a way to force CDSEO or google to index only the last page - IE - the detailed description pages for each product and not the short description page?

Why - Because on our site the "short description and detailed description text are the same" for each product.

The problem is google see this as duplicate content or partially duplicate we suspect.

Example:
URL http://www.tvrepairkits.com/xcart/kdp-51ws655/
Goes to Category "TV Repair Kits / Sony / Projection / KDP-51WS655"

At this category level there is a products listed for this Sony TV model. If you drill down intothe product the detailed description on that pages will match the one on the page page before.

The detailed page for one of the products....


So at the very least google would see at least some of the content on the prior page as duplicate. If we had a dozen products in the root category it may not matter...but in most cases we have just one product or two.

I hope my description of the problem makes sense. Any comments and suggestions are welcome.
__________________
Xcart 4.2.1
Xcart 4.1.9

[Jon]

The only time we've seen a substantial drop related to rankings upon CDSEO installation is when someone changed from a custom url structure and didn't implement 301 redirects manually. CDSEO by default 301 redirects the default php, clean urls, and html catalog links.


In 8 years we've never had a report of a substantial drop related to anything else. The time frame does coincide somewhat with the Google Penguin update that happened at the end of April/May so the issue may be unrelated.

I am seeing 38,000+ of your pages index so indexing certainly isn't the problem.

If you send me FTP and X-Cart admin access via our support desk I will review your CDSEO setup to make sure it was done correctly.

Duplicate content is an issue with your short/long description setup, but alone shouldn't cause such a drop. If you wanted to deindex these you could turn of url replacement for categories in the CDSEO Admin section and then block home.php?cat=* via robots.txt

[ecollier2012]

Thanks Jon for the quick reply. We agree - its very unusual which is why were concerned. Were not sure if its a config mistake on our end or some odd new Google penalty for having a ton of URL changes all at once since it went from dynamic php type urls to cleaner html versions. The dates also do not line up exactly with the April 24 penguin update..which makes it even more of a mystery.

Duplicate content - thanks for the suggestion - that makes sense - we will look into rewriting the short/long descriptions or just block the category level all together.

As always - thanks for the great support on the product.