Progress Towards 1.5.0

alex1 wrote:

Daniel wrote: 2) Fix the duplicate URL issue (I read the topics, but even with canonical statements, Google still picks up the non canonical and causes problems)
This is not a problem. People are a bit stupied and read some bad information in a forum some where. it has already been said by google themseleves and other search engines that googles algorithm will decide which url to use when the content is the same. I have been creating web sites now for some 10+ years. I know all about SEO.

This has nothing to do with reading information. I have been building sites since 95 and have worked for major online sites. When you are browsing categories, the sidebar changes to display the category you are in. However, when you browse an individual product from the canonical URL, the categories do not show. Now only is this less keywords for SEO purposes, it also is not good user experience because they would likely convert higher if the categories were displayed and they could pick a different product.

I've been watching how Google indexes my new OpenCart sites, and its been picking the canonical URL in about 60% of the cases. It will likely pick them eventually, but in the meantime, until it figures it out, the pages don't rank.

My suggestion would be a simple fix of changing the canonical URL to include the categories. It would shut everyone up.

Xsecrets wrote: You are wrong it's not a simple fix. You obviously don't understand the data structure. Opencart allows you to assign products to as many categories as you want, so there is no way to determine which category to use unless you browsed there through the category tree. Also you seem to be so high on Magento, but it takes about half a second to do a search and see they have the same issues which is why they had a cononical plugin pretty much right off the bat. The only way to solve it completely is to just not use the category or manufacturer in any of the product urls, but all you seo freaks complain about that solution too.

Xsecrets wrote:You are wrong it's not a simple fix. You obviously don't understand the data structure. Opencart allows you to assign products to as many categories as you want, so there is no way to determine which category to use unless you browsed there through the category tree.

http://www.mydomain.com/product/product_name_or_keywords_in_page_language

http://www.mydomain.com/category/category_name_or_keywords_in_page_language

http://www.mydomain.com/category_keywords/product_keywords

Daniel wrote:you might be right. i watched a few more matt cutts videos recently and it look like they changed the rules from saying duplicate urls to the same cohntatdo not matter to them now telling people to use the cronicoal url.

i need to do some more research.

op_user wrote:Just a quick clarification, will there be a 1.5.0 beta for bug-testing before official release? I wanted to know (as I'm willing to help find bugs) and the latest topic I found on this was locked.

Thanks to the developers for their hard efforts!

i2Paq wrote:There is always a first pre-release for beta testing.

alex1 wrote:Daniel,

One more thing I noticed that hurts SEO with OpenCart.

If a search engine browses a category, and then they sort by any option, it turns into duplicate content because the URL changes but the content basically stays the same (except it's sort order).

My suggestion would be that any time there is a sort to add a NOINDEX, FOLLOW attribute in the meta tags or a canonical tag.

Thanks

sooskriszta wrote:You should put these in the Ignore parameters in Google Webmaster tools

alex1 wrote: I don't understand why some people are so fast to say things like "SEO Bandwagon", or "URL bandwagon". These types of things are the most important to most people in ecommerce because it brings free traffic. It might not be important to you, but it is to the people out there searching for an ecommerce platform to use. Personally, I'd like for them to use OpenCart... so any little things that can get added to make people happy, and are quick wins, I think should be added.

alex1 wrote:

sooskriszta wrote:You should put these in the Ignore parameters in Google Webmaster tools

Yeah, you can do a lot of things, but it would be ideal for OpenCart to include these as part of the package.

Xsecrets wrote:We say things like that because we've been doing this long enough to know that it's all a bunch of smoke and mirrors. There are tons of "SEO Experts" out there and every one of them has conflicting ideas about what is needed. For the most part it's all a bunch of crap. If you have good content you get the ranking and the free traffic. All the other crap is just that crap.

sooskriszta wrote:Do you have a list of all the things that should be included in meta tags?

Fact is, if you go to Google Webmaster tools, you will see that Google already puts parameters like SORT into the ignore bucket...meaning different sorts in OpenCart are NOT counted as different pages, and thus are not disqualified as duplicate content.

Google isn't as stupid as you may initially think.

In principle, I agree, the core should have the things that make a big impact but are easy to do. Unfortunately, 90% of SEO suggestions here don't fall in that category (except mine, of course ) Where's Q? Is he implementing my multilingual SEO keywords?