Unique Product URLs for SEO Improvement

Hi All,

I am new to the OpenCart community so I am not quite sure if this is the right place for this feature suggestion. So please point me to the right point if this isn't it.

Version 1.4.7 of OpenCart provides a build in feature for search engine friendly urls. But turning this on rould result in multiple different urls for the same product page when using product categories. In the demo shop you can reach the same product via
http://demo.opencart.com/index.php?rout ... uct_id=100" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; and
http://demo.opencart.com/index.php?rout ... uct_id=100" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
SEO optimized this might be
http://demo.opencart.com/apple-cinema-30" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; and
http://demo.opencart.com/components/mon ... -cinema-30" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Search engines like google and others do not like those duplicates and your shop might be punished for this.
I understand that some might want to keep the path information to be able to display the breadcrumb on the products page. For this, I like to recommend a new option in the store settings next to the search engine friendly urls to activate unique product urls.

To implement this, some would need to extend the configuration page.
There are two options for the output Generation:

Option 1: Change the catalog\controller\product\category.php Controller class on line 151. This line must include the path information to the url or not, depending on the new configuration.

Option 2: Enhance the ModelToolSeoUrl class in catalog/model/tool/seo_url.php. If the unique url setting is activated, ensure that no other information is included to the url if a product_id is present.

I woulld prefer to go with Option 2 for a better encapsulation and separation of concerns with the rest of the code.

What do you think about this enhancement?

If someone is able to point me to the contribution process, I would be happy to provide those modifications to the project.

Thanks in advanced for your feedback!
Cheers
Benjamin

This is bugging me too! We can have up to 4 different urls for the homepage also.

example.com
http://www.example.com" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
example.com/index.php?route=common/home
http://www.example.com/index.php?route=common/home" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

i was reading something about how if your page is a duplicate Google will search your page for a URL, which if it links to the duplicated page displaying the same exact same information then it dis-credits that page as its just quoting the original.

I was thinking if you had a link to the correct URL of the page in the bottom of the item description or the bottom of the homepage Google won't count the page if the wrong URL is displayed as it will look like this page is quoting the original page. I’m so bad at trying to explain this so ill give an example.

When Google visits "http://www.example.com/product/item" you have a link at the bottom of the description linking to "http://example.com/product/item" or even "http://example.com/item". What ever this link is, it will be the only URL Google will index highly as all the other URLs will appear to be quoting from this page, also Google will acknowledge that this page has been quoted and won't rank it down because of the dup!!!

Hope you understand this, it was just an idea to get round this issue with knowing php code. Although i have opened a site less than a week ago in a competitive market and am already ranking page 2 for most of my popular searches

I would assume Google have an algorithm in place to detect this and we shouldn't worry about dup'd products.

Good comments, i totally agree. Its very important to get rid of all duplicate urls.
I would like to hire someone to sort this out for my opencart site. paying well.

this has been discussed ad nauseum here. The plain fact is that google doesn't penalize you for duplicate content. The worst that might happen is that they rank a different url than the one you were intending.

I know that it was planned at one point to integrate canonical urls which would alleviate that problem too, though I'm not sure what the status of that is.

I will see about adding canonical urls to pages for 1.4.8 if I can get it to work. I won't spend a lot of time on it though if I can't.

well, the fact that you do not know which of your product urls is kept by google is penality enough.
Imagine that you have one product url linked from your homepage and one deep inside your category tree. If the later one has a poor ranking, you do not want this one kept by google.
The other reason is the on page linking factor. It can push your page if it has been linked from other sides even inside your own homepage.

Myself, I would prefer to fix the problem of duplicate urls itself and do not use a workaround like canonical urls.

What do you think about providing the configuration choice between cononical urls and the solution proposed above?

Here's the big problem. It doesn't matter what you do you cannnot satisfy all the "SEO Experts" because they all have different ideas. As far as the duplicate content you cannon as in it's imposible to remove duplicate content other than making product pages be domain.com/product because open cart allows products to be in multiple categories and in manufacturers, however as soon as you say you want to make it always be domain.com/product without the categories then an "SEO Expert" comes in and say oh no you can't do that it'll kill your ranking google will kick you off your site is going to die and it's going to be the end of the world. Just like they do with the current system.

benjamin wrote:well, the fact that you do not know which of your product urls is kept by google is penality enough.
Imagine that you have one product url linked from your homepage and one deep inside your category tree.

It's not about which has ranking. SEO isn't for search engines anymore. Its only used for visual affect for humans. The canonical will just be set to the non-seo'd version of the url, of which there is only 1.

Qphoria wrote:
It's not about which has ranking. SEO isn't for search engines anymore. Its only used for visual affect for humans. The canonical will just be set to the non-seo'd version of the url, of which there is only 1.

problem is that's not exactly true either. you'll have a path parameter if you went through a category and you won't if you went straight off the homepage same with manufacturer. It goes back to what I said with the flexibility that opencart allows you with the categories and manufacturer you can't really determine a default uri without stripping it down to the product only, but then people holler about that.

perhaps then the first time it is loaded, that becomes the canonical url.. but yea.. its messy. It needs to be revisited. But what should it be? or or or
what?

This is the best seo url in my opinion:

problem is that no matter what you do there will be people complain about it. Like I said the easiest and only way that I see without more work than it's worth at this point would be to make it but you know people will get all up in arms about that. otherwise you would have to code in some way to set a default category and always pull that for the url. even then people will get upset because they came from a manufacturer page and it doesn't look like it. It's unfortunately a no win situation.

What is wrong with using Pretty URLs and 301 redirects?

FatCat wrote:What is wrong with using Pretty URLs and 301 redirects?

301 redirect to where? now were back to the same problem I've been touting the whole time there is no "primary" way to access a product, and as soon as you choose one someone will complain.

Hi,

Apologies for opening a 6 week old thread but I'd like to add some thoughts.

I've been evaluating OpenCart today and I'm blown away. So simple and intuitive to use and it was simple to install then I noticed the 'issue' that's been discussed here, duplicate content or more precisely multiple URL's the to same content.

This isn't ideal but neither is it terminal. First off Google doesn't penalise sites for duplicate content but it can make search results a little strange, especially if a URL changes, for example if a category name changes.

Perhaps this solution could be incorporated?

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot. ... nical.html

Each product could have a field for the canonical URL and every instance of the product would then carry the link rel=canonical tag in the head of the document. This could even be automated (via a checkbox option) to use the site URL + SEO keyword to create the default canonical URL tag.

Possible solution?

d

I now realise this can easily be added to the template header file. Could someone advise me the variable name of the SEO keyword variable? Is this globally accessible? If so then adding this pretty much sorts the issue.
cheers

d

Apologies for suggesting a fix that had eh.....already been implemented.

d

My web site: www.burnmystuff.net shows Google Page Rank-0
www.burnmystuff.net/index.php?route=common/home shows Google Page Rank-1

Do I need to be worried that different rankings for same home page? Or how do I fix this??

Bruce