SEO URL

[Karlos]

SEO URL is enabled and seems to be working except it is not working on all pages.  It seems to work on all products but not on all categories.  It seems to work on first and second level categories but not third level categories.  Any ideas anyone ?

[Basara]

It seems to work on all products but not on all categories. 

Hello. Did you generate SEO url for all categories?

[Karlos]

Hi Basara,

Thanks for the response.  Yes I always make sure I generate a URL when setting up a category or product.  I have just been back to check and I have done this.  Just seems odd that first and second parent category are OK but the third will not generate seo URL.  In system settings I have use SEO URL's turned on. The htaccess.txt has been changed to .htaccess.  Could there be a problem with the apache module rewrite ?

Thanks

[Basara]

Hello.

As for me third level SEO url works fine in the AbanteCart 1.2.5
Contact with your hosting provider maybe they give some light on this problem

[Karlos]

Hi,

I asked my host to look at the .htaccess file and they confirmed that the mod rewrite is installed correctly and active.  What I have noticed is that by the time I get to the third child category or beyond, the seo friendly url is there except added at the end of each url is the following:    ?sort=date_modified-ASC  .  If I then delete this part or the url in the browser, the same web page appears with the correct url.  So this looks like I have duplicate pages with seo friendly url's and some without.  The question is how can I stop the duplicate pages and why do the categories link to the unfriendly url'S?

I hope that make sense !

Thanks

[Basara]

Hello.

When you use AbanteCart admin interface and create categories with same name like "New category" - AbanteCart will generate unique seo urls new-category new-category_72 (category id)..... so seo url can Not be duplicated in this case. 

If you create categories manually for example via CSV Import or Manual database edit in this case you can made duplicates.

[Karlos]

Thanks for the response Basara.  None of the categories were created manually, all  used AbanteCart to generate url's.  Im really struggling with this now  . the site is www.kal-tech.co.uk  if it helps to see what is happening.

Thanks

[Basara]

Hello. Login to your AbanteCart administration and clear AbanteCart cache, next open categories which one not work and try to Generate new urls. Check then do you have same keyword or new?

[Karlos]

Hi,

Just tried that and it generates the same keyword.  I have also tried creating  a new test category called "test category" , with one parent category.  I generated a keyword which was "test-category" This works ok. I then generated another category using "test category" as the parent, I called this "test category two".  I generated the keyword which was "test-category-two".  When I display the test category two page in my browser the url is kal-tech.co.uk/test-category-two?sort=date_modified-ASC.  Any more ideas   ??

[Basara]

Hi. Please send me privately access to your Admin. I will try to see your configuration
Also make sure your .htaccess file is default AbanteCart file
https://github.com/abantecart/abantecart-src/blob/master/public_html/.htaccess.txt

[Basara]

Hello.

I have created few new categories and all of them work with SEO URLS on your site. For the  ?sort=date_modified-ASC addition it is related to the Sort Products as default by setting Admin > System > Settings > General

[Karlos]

Hi Basara,

Thank you for taking the time to look at my site, I really do appreciate it.

The ( ?sort=date_modified-ASC)  addition at the end of the URL is still not really making sense to me.  I see that it is related to sort products but this is added regardless of any products being present or not.

With the new categories that you have created I have since added a few more categories and each category after category 2 adds the  ( ?sort=date_modified-ASC)  after the URL even though no products are present.  I noticed the final category that you created added the ( ?sort=date_modified-ASC) addition with no products being added. Obviously this is not an seo friendly URL so should this really be happening ?  I am finding on my first and second level categories are found in Google but the other categories are not.

I have now added 2 products to the new category2 and when accessed from the drop down menu it shows url without ( ?sort=date_modified-ASC) addition.  If this same category is accessed by clicking straight on the category 1 tab(without using drop down menu), then click on category 2, the url  now adds ( ?sort=date_modified-ASC).

If you need to log on and have another look then log on details still the same.

Thanks again

Karl

[Basara]

Hi.

I am not the best in SEO but according to google "Providing search engines with dynamic URLs should be favored over hiding parameters to make them look static." take a look  https://moz.com/blog/dynamic-urls-vs-static-urls-the-best-practice-for-seo-is-still-clear

Feel free to post what you think. If this really critical for many users we can think how to resolve in next versions.

[Karlos]

Hi,

Thanks for the link, it's  an interesting article.  It sounds like from the article that Moz disagree with Google and prefer static URL's for SEO.  I'm no expert but from what I see I probably agree with Moz.  Pages on my site with static URL seem to get found by google and some rank quite well for their keywords.  The ones with Dynamic URL's do not seem to get crawled by google easily and do not get found for their keywords.   A quick search on google for any product and 90% of the web pages returned on the first few pages seem to have static pages, with the exception of Amazon. Not sure if that tells us anything!

It may be nice if it could be addressed possibly in the next version. 

Anyway thanks for all your help,  keep up the good work with Abantecart as it is definitely  the best shopping cart software out there !

[eCommerce Core]

Fixed to show to sorting on default listing, but if sorting is changed, there will be sort params visible in URL. This can not be removed.

https://github.com/abantecart/abantecart-src/commit/0f585fe750b1305a1c9929757752123b0a758c46