Canonical URLs are a Band Aid. Whether or not Google penalizes rel="canonical" isn't very clear, but it shouldn't be necessary.countzer0 wrote:I am concerned about the way canonical URLs are used in OpenCart. I am using SEO friendly URLs and my site has been indexed under the http://www.sitename.com/product-name.html URL instead of http://www.sitename.com/category/sub-ca ... -name.html or http://www.sitename.com/manufacturer/product-name.html. All well and good except for this:
1. I am using optimized page titles of the format "Product - Category - Site Name". The canonical URL is not in a category so the titles indexed become "Product - - Site Name". Not good for SEO or click-throughs.
2. The canonical URL pages do not have expanded navigation or breadcrumbs. This means that the internal linking which allows Google etc. to calculate the internal linking hierarchy of the site is non-existent: in effect, all pages are at the top-level, and the category/sub-category pages are very weakly cross-linked. Again, not good for SEO.
Is it possible to force the canonical URLs to be of the format http://www.sitename.com/category/sub-ca ... -name.html? I am using 1.5.1.1.
The "Pretty Damn Sexy - 1" seo extension takes care of this, and all product URLs will grow out of the site's url rather than out of a category or manufacturer. One product, one URL The breadcrumbs will still be displayed, of course, but this isn't the major problem with OpenCart and seo. The main problem is "related products," and this causes many erroneous search engine listings that are there only because the products are related.
Remove ALL related products. If you're running OpenCart 1.4.X.X you'll also need to edit the catalog/language/english/product/product.php file.
Search for:
Code: Select all
$_['text_no_related'] = 'There are no related products for this product.';
Code: Select all
$_['text_no_related'] = '';
This will result in a DRAMATIC improvement in the search engine listings.
Whoever wrote the "Related Products" code apparently knew nothing about seo. The search engines ignore the tabs and pickup on the "Related Products" URLs.