OpenCart Community

i've already added it to the next release. it will only work on the product pages though.

is that enough?

rph wrote:

Xsecrets wrote:

Daniel wrote:The solution is here:

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

yes it would be nice to have a canonical solution.

That would also allow for a default product breadcrumb when one isn't present (e.g. products linked from the front page). The problem is I don't think it's doable without database changes.

not necessarily, domain.com/product-name for all products and dropping the categories/manufacturers is a perfectly fine canonical solution that can be done without any major changes.

Daniel wrote:reading up on this stuff now:

Quote from Google Central :

“having multiple URLs on the same domain that point to the same content. Like http://www.example.com/skates.asp?color ... nd=riedell and http://www.example.com/skates.asp?brand ... olor=black. Having this type of duplicate content on your site can potentially affect your site’s performance, but it doesn’t cause penalties.”

See the article : http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot. ... nalty.html

I think the problem with your quote is that by "duplicate content", Google mean the whole web page is the same except for the url.

I'm not sure how they would react to having different urls that all point to the same version of the page with a slight difference (ie breadcrumb trail).

See: http://www.google.com/support/webmaster ... swer=66359

yes this is why they have broght out the canonical link!

Xsecrets wrote:not necessarily, domain.com/product-name for all products and dropping the categories/manufacturers is a perfectly fine canonical solution that can be done without any major changes.

That wouldn't do anything about a default breadcrumb. Admittedly it's a somewhat separate issue but having a product connected to categories is a great way to get people who come in from a web search looking around the site.

I would also imagine cutting out (sub)categories means your URL keywords might not be as rich (without going back and rewriting them at least).

Hi,

I would like to have the opposite solution, wherever we are; home page, product page, category page, cart. etc. The url to the products (those in sideboxes also) would link to http://www.mystore.com/category/subcategory/product-url

Is that too hard to implement ?

Regards
Ed

Xsecrets wrote:

Leon wrote:As MitchMcBride said, set the primary category which is the one that shows, then have other categories.
As browsing by manufacturer - what difference would it make?

well some people see the breadcrumb as just that a way to get back to where you came from so if you have a category in there when you came from a manufacturer page then you wouldn't be going back where you came from. I had a client throw a fit on another solution because the breadcrumbs didn't show specials or new products when you came from that page. As far as SEO duplicate content it would make a difference because category/product would be the same as manufacturer/product and thus duplicate content.

in the dynamic content world you can not avoid having the same content from different urls that is why you have this tag:

<link href="http://dev.opencart.com/index.php?route ... duct_id=48" rel="canonical" />

Daniel wrote:

Xsecrets wrote:

Leon wrote:As MitchMcBride said, set the primary category which is the one that shows, then have other categories.
As browsing by manufacturer - what difference would it make?

well some people see the breadcrumb as just that a way to get back to where you came from so if you have a category in there when you came from a manufacturer page then you wouldn't be going back where you came from. I had a client throw a fit on another solution because the breadcrumbs didn't show specials or new products when you came from that page. As far as SEO duplicate content it would make a difference because category/product would be the same as manufacturer/product and thus duplicate content.

in the dynamic content world you can not avoid having the same content from different urls that is why you have this tag:

<link href="http://dev.opencart.com/index.php?route ... duct_id=48" rel="canonical" />

last I looked no one has implemented cononical urls yet though.

im using 1.4.0. i have problem with duplicate content and duplicate url
i created a sitemap using sitemap generator and produces something like

As some support for MitchMcBride, I was reading a recent interview with Matt Cutts (Mr Google) and he seems to suggest having a primary category is better than rel=canonical. The interview is here: http://www.stonetemple.com/articles/int ... 2510.shtml

He discusses duplicate content produced by faceted navigation (including having things in several categories) at length and seems to be suggesting that sorting the site architecture out first, with a hierachy of parameters such as category, is best. 301 redirects would be second best. Then he suggests using rel=canonical if you can't do either of the first two.

Wordpress uses a primary category URL system for blog posts. I'm not sure what the best solution is at all because it IS weird for users to be searching in, say, a living room products category, then find themselves in the lighting category because they are looking at a living room light.

This is, however, a serious issue that does need some sort of fix. I love OpenCart, but am considering switching if I can't find a good solution to this problem.

For anyone questioning if duplicated content is an issue, please watch this video http://vimeo.com/8110399" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; in fact you prob would be intrested in most of this guys videos. He seems to know his stuff!!!

Im pasting below part of a post i left somewere else, tell me if im just talking rubbish:
----------------------------------------------------------
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 multiple URLS.

nice video.

Link attribution sort of makes this topic redundant.

The search engines will only go for the url that is the most popular. i.e has the most links pointing to it or the search engines think is more important.

no need to be so silly to make sure the content on each different url is different. i mean what are you soposed to do if there is multiple ways to access the same content such as paging and sorting? crazy it will never work. this is down to the search engines to fix not webmasters.

ifyouseek wrote: tell me if im just talking rubbish

fair enough, so basically i was!

If you're worried about duplicate content there is a simple fix that requires no work on the end of opencart. Simply use the robots.txt file to block the duplicate pages that you don't work. Everyone that is SEO crazed on this board should of known this from the get go and solved this problem already

Simple solution to a simple problem, if anyone needs some help regarding robots.txt just leave a reply.

hey, so what would you suggest doing with the robot.txt. I only know how to block the search engine looking at certain directories; this doesnt seem the best way unless im missing something. can you please elaborate on this method because im intrested. Also are you able to use the robot.txt to stop google indexing multiple URLs for the homepage?

Has anyone figured out a better way to fix the duplicate URLs problem? This is a serious issue for SEO.....

it's easy to hack it so that it only shows productname instead of category/productname or manufacturer/productname then you have no duplicate content whatsoever, but you SEO types aren't satisfied with that either, so you're stuck with duplicate content.

Well, that would be a very good first step

bizbey wrote:Well, that would be a very good first step

well then just hop back to the first post in this thread. That's why this whole discussion started because that person told how to just do product and not account for the category, and the "SEO experts" promplty showed up to tell us how there is not possible solution that will satisfy everyone.

Well in SEO if you are use duplicate urls for your any page you must have error. You can use different url for your all pages. Otherwise SEO have module error problem will be created.