SEO and "old" urls

Hy,
just a quick question. I want to "upgrade" to SEO urls and I want to ask, if I "upgrade" to SEO urls will the old urls (product links) still work?
as Ive got many products linked to the old urls...

thx!!

If under "old" you mean "original, non-SEF", then yes, of course, they'll still be working.

If you previously used an seo url like this-was-my-url and change it to this-is-new-url the answer is no. If you used something other than opencart before with a different url or seo-url structure, the answer is no. You will need to create a 301 redirect in your .htaccess file for any links you want to keep working.

If you mean the index.php?product= or whatever the non-seo url format for opencart is (cannot remember it exactly), then use - it will auto direct when you set up the seo url.

Rule of thumb, once you create a url, do NOT change it.

In general, for any web-based application, if the "native" format is something like /product_list.php?prod_id=12345, SEO will translate /product/12345 to the previous form (using a URL Query String) via .htaccess rewriting, and thus the previous form will still work. It's quite possible that an application will do something different, but normally this is the case. It's not impossible, but rare, for the old format to become unsupported when SEO is added (and this is very poor design!).

For every product entered, in the Data tab you can actually set the exact url to be used for the SEO url. So are you recommending that we simply use the exact same url's that were used for the previous website's products?

RideTheWave wrote: ↑

Tue Jun 13, 2017 8:56 pm

So are you recommending that we simply use the exact same url's that were used for the previous website's products?

Well, you can try that if the old format no longer works (e.g., you changed one SEO format to a different one, and neither is the "native" URL format). Otherwise, you could add rewrites to .htaccess (if not too laborious -- if there's a simple pattern you can use). Do this only for old products, and let new products use the new SEO. My understanding is that explicitly setting the product URL only changes outbound links, and does nothing to help incoming search engine entries and bookmarks using the old format. I'm not sure that it will match incoming URLs and change them, but you're welcome to try it on one or two products (please report back what you find).

If you change or add SEO, and the old format still works, just leave it alone (no need to rewrite or manually set the URL).

MrPhil wrote: ↑

Wed Jun 14, 2017 10:01 pm

My understanding is that explicitly setting the product URL only changes outbound links, and does nothing to help incoming search engine entries and bookmarks using the old format. I'm not sure that it will match incoming URLs and change them, but you're welcome to try it on one or two products (please report back what you find).

I noticed that OpenCart uses the url structure: www.mydomain.com/category/sub-category/productname.html (if I set the product's SEO url to be: productname.html). My old website's url structure is: www.mydomain.com/sub-category/productname.html (it excludes the category name but keeps the sub-category name). At first I thought this would be a problem but when I actually typed the url (without the category name) in the OC site, it still goes to the product page. In fact, if you just type www.mydomain.com/productname.html (without any category or sub-category names) it still goes to the product page. So this made me feel a lot better but your post has me worried again.

If the search engines have indexed the url: www.mydomain.com/sub-category/productname.html and if typing that exact same url goes to the product page in the OpenCart site, are you suggesting that for some reason search engines still won't find it?

There are now so many variables here that I can't tell you for certain. If a different URL goes to the same place, it sounds like no problem. If it's a 301 redirect with a changed URL, the search engines will update their listing to the new URL. All you can do is try it out, and see if it works. So long as the old URL (that search engines have indexed) doesn't give them a 404 (or other failure), things should be fine.