Questions about Opencart's SEO and Customizability

Hello Opencart forums,

First off I'd just like to say that Opencart looks fantastic and from reading a couple of threads here it seems that the community support is great.

I've been looking at different e-commerce platforms for a website I'm planning to build. It's going to sell mens' and womens' clothing.

I took a look at the demo domain and admin panel. The domain looked nice and the admin panel was really easy to navigate and configure.

I have not installed Opencart, as I'm trying to snag the perfect domain when it becomes avialable for auctions on Godaddy. I might just buy a .info and install it as a test, to see If I can do it properly.

However I have some concerns. It seems that default SEO on Opencart is not too good. Many sites using Opencart have ugly urls like http://www.mysite.com/index.php?route=p ... t_id=23414.

I've looked at a few threads here and read: http://forum.opencart.com/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=25551
which was the most helpful. It appears that implenting proper SEO is rather hard or tedious compared to a CMS like wordpress, where all you have to do is add /%postname%/ to permalinks and you're finished for SEO.

My question is, is it possible to sort sites like this: http://www.mysite.com/productname and http://www.mysite.com/category easily?

For example if a visitor were to land on my home page and click on the category "tank tops" in the category module, I want them to land http://www.mysite.com/category And then from there If they click on a product they want to see I want the url to be http://www.mysite.com/nameofproduct (or the title of the product) instead of http://www.mysite.com/category/product name.

Same thing for everything else like if I added a Recent News module I'd want it to be http://www.mysite.com/news and the excerpts of posts/articles pointing to http://www.mysite.com/titleofarticle but not http://www.mysite.com/news/titleofarticle. Or if I added a manurfacturer's module: http://www.mysite.com/manufacturer and http://www.mysite.com/productname but never http://www.mysite.com/manufacturer/product name.

Next question is, is it possible to make this automatic (like permalinks on Wordpress)? Or are we going to have to edit each and every url ourselves? This is a big issue for me because I am going to have over 50,000 products and 100 categories + other modules on my upcoming site. I guess I could settle for just changing the urls of the categories manually but even that will be a large time consumer. Oh yeah and do we have add rel=canonical everytime we change the urls?

Although this question isn't an issue now (as I haven't even built the site), it will become very important later on so I might as well ask. Ultimately, I want to have one site with two seperate sections. A man's and woman's section. I want the structure to be like this (the same thing as what I noted before, except theres now a /mens/ and /womens/ before everything:

http://www.mysite.com/ (homepage, lists general specials, unisex clothing, perhaps a nice slider etc.)
http://www.mysite.com/about (about page)
http://www.mysite.com/refund (refund policy)
http://www.mysite.com/news (newspage)
http://www.mysite.com/account (account page for member sign-ups)
http://www.mysite.com/mens (men's store starts here, with it own header, color scheme, and slider, of course resemeblimg the home page)
http://www.mysite.com/mens/boxers (example of product cateogry)
http://www.mysite.com/mens/fruit-of-loom-XL (example of product)
http://www.mysite.com/womens (women's store starts here, with it own header, color scheme, and slider resemebeling the home page)
http://www.mysite.com/womens/blouses (example of product category)
http://www.mysite.com/womens/pink-blouse (example of product)

So basically, anything without /mens/ and /womens/ will have the home page theme. Anything after /mens/ and /womens/ will have their theme. Hopefully this isn't too complex or I'm not asking way too much.

I also thought about making 2 subdomains for each section but then It would be twice as hard building backlinks to the site because subdomains don't share link juice very well. What I listed above is what I ultimtely hope to achieve.

I'm really sorry for the walls of text but I have to make sure I know everything about this before I implenment it in my sites. Thanks so much guys!

These would be possible to do, but are not part of the initial structure of opencart, so you would need to make changes or hire someone to do so. Also you don't need to buy a domain. Most hosts will let you run off a subdomain of theirs for nothing, or have you at an ip address followed by /~your-username/ which works just the same

Thanks Jay.

Are there any threads here that can me teach to accomplish that structure? I tried the search function here but I coudn't find what I was looking for.

Thanks!

As for your first point, it is quite easy to change the links to products on Category pages to /productname instead of /category/productname. If you are doing that for the benefit of your users then do it.

However, if you are doing it for search engines then there is no need as OpenCart DOES use the rel=canonical metatag, which lists only the /productname URL on product pages, and is automatically updated if you change productname. That is the only URL the search engines will index, and you will have no duplicate content no matter how many categories you put a product in.

Same applies for manufacturer/productname, and any information pages such as about. Pages such as Contact and Sitemap are listed slightly differently but still SEO friendly. And I'd recommend blocking access to pages such as Cart and Account for SEO purposes.

I'm not sure how the news module works, so can't advise you there.

Unfortunately rel=canonical means the links you posted at the bottom will be indexed as
http://www.mysite.com/mens (fine)
http://www.mysite.com/mens/boxers (fine)
http://www.mysite.com/fruit-of-loom-XL (not how you want)
http://www.mysite.com/womens (fine)
http://www.mysite.com/womens/blouses (fine)
http://www.mysite.com/pink-blouse (not how you want)

However, as you want a different stylesheet etc. for mens and womens, it should be easy to also add /mens/ and /womens/ to the rel=canonical link.

Finally thing: /productname is not automatically generated, but you could automatically populate your database by taking your list of product names, changing to lowercase and replacing all spaces with hyphens.

Oh, but you can't have any duplicates as the URL works from the final part only. So you couldn't have /mens/tops and /womens/tops. When I have this problem I just change them to /mens/mens-tops /womens/womens-tops

Hope that helps.

There's the auto seo mod too
http://forum.opencart.com/viewtopic.php?t=15177

DOWNLOAD HERE

Didn't know about that one. Looks very useful.

certainly beats typing in one after the other

As for your first point, it is quite easy to change the links to products on Category pages to /productname instead of /category/productname. If you are doing that for the benefit of your users then do it.

However, if you are doing it for search engines then there is no need as OpenCart DOES use the rel=canonical metatag, which lists only the /productname URL on product pages, and is automatically updated if you change productname. That is the only URL....

I would've responded sooner but I was busy with other stuff, sorry.

Chones, thank you very much. So far it seems I have no problems with Opencart at the moment. I was able to upload the htaccess file correctly, and set-up SEO urls.

Also thank you jay, for the auto-seo module. It's going to REALLY help me with the store, since I'm going to upload a huge list of products soon (tested the auto-seo module and it works fine).

My next step is to figure out how I can achieve the structure I want in my website. Chones you said I can't structure it so that /mens/ can be before the product name right, but only when the category is there too right? If that's the only way it can be structured so that I can have two serperate parts of the store, then I guess I can deal with it.

Something like:

http://www.mysite.com/
http://www.mysite.com/mens/
http://www.mysite.com/mens/boxers/
http://www.mysite.com/mens/boxers/fruit-of-loom

Would be an alternative for me, as long as I am able to style http://www.mysite.com, /womens/, and /mens/ differently.

Same applies for manufacturer/productname, and any information pages such as about. Pages such as Contact and Sitemap are listed slightly differently but still SEO friendly. And I'd recommend blocking access to pages such as Cart and Account for SEO purposes.

Oh alright. So how would I go about blocking access to the cart, account, and contact page?

Once again, thank you Chones and Jay!

EDIT: I'll buy you a beer, Chones, once my site takes off

Hi there, here's my robots.txt file - it blocks all the pages you don't want indexed That stops the same category page or specials page being indexed for every possible sort option. It stops all checkout pages, account pages and search pages being indexed. It stops a duplicate entry being indexed for a category page when that category page is accessed from page 2 or 3 etc., and it stops the Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy as accessed from the Checkout stage being indexed.