OpenCart Community

I just want to confirm the usage of SEO Keywords. For all occurrences of SEO Keywords (Categories,
Products, Information etc)

The recommended format is e.g.:
"product-name-whatever"

This format is not preferred:
"product_name_whatever"

This will cause the correctly formatted URL for Search Engines
www.yourfavsite.com/product-type/product-name-whatever

Please confirm that I have this right.

Whether you use a dash or underscore is a matter of preference. I use a dash myself but the demo products use underscores.

The biggest problem is not key_key or key-key
but that this OpenCart generate duplicate content that get penalty to your shop online!

Man, SEO is filled with so much misinformation.

"Let's put this to bed once and for all, folks: There's no such thing as a 'duplicate content penalty.'"
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot. ... nalty.html

reopen the discussion, you are telling us about a discussion of 2008. This show your ignorance in SEO. Algorithm change so often and i want that people knows that if they are using this opencart is damaging himself.

When we detect duplicate content, such as through variations caused by URL parameters, we group the duplicate URLs into one cluster.
We select what we think is the "best" URL to represent the cluster in search results.
We then consolidate properties of the URLs in the cluster, such as link popularity, to the representative URL.

Read that in page you gave us, so what happen if people link always different pages of the same product? maybe 5 link one, 5 link another, and 5 another one... then what's the most important?

isn't better 15 link the same page? is it so difficult to be understood by your developers?

you are very open (source) mind to don't understand that, are you able to implement that? because this is the only one script that is not able to implement that.

Give me a break. Here's a video from late last year where Google again says the duplicate content penalty is a myth. If you have evidence it actually exists then post it. Until then I'm inclined to believe you're just another self-proclaimed expert flapping their gums.

If you want to increase the strength of your content use canonical URLs on multi-category products just like the original link states and as has been discussed here multiple times before.

rph wrote:Man, SEO is filled with so much misinformation.

"Let's put this to bed once and for all, folks: There's no such thing as a 'duplicate content penalty.'"
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot. ... nalty.html

Hark! There still exists a voice of reason in the midst!

atreoseo wrote:are you able to implement that? because this is the only one script that is not able to implement that.

Sounds to me like you haven't looked at any other scripts, because I've seen these very same arguments on every shopping cart script I've ever looked at. It's virtually impossible to have an ecommerce site that has no duplicate content.

Oh my god....

Another SEO expert bites the dust............

lol.. as I said, I'm adding it in the next version just to shut everyone up about it.

what would be really nice and would fix alot of the criticism is to have a canonical url solution in place.

Can anyone give an example of a live (non-development) Opencart site and some popular SEO keywords that actually ranks high in Google?

If such sites exist (and I've never seen one built in Opencart that comes anywhere near the top) I'd be interested in looking at their content and URL structure.

Chris P Duck wrote:Can anyone give an example of a live (non-development) Opencart site and some popular SEO keywords that actually ranks high in Google?

If such sites exist (and I've never seen one built in Opencart that comes anywhere near the top) I'd be interested in looking at their content and URL structure.

http://www.unbannable.com/ocstore/index.php
Search:
opencart mods
opencart payment
opencart shipping
opencart modules
opencart integration
opencart fedex

Hmm... that's quite a specific area though isn't it. I mean if I search for a company name, I pretty much expect to find the company website! It's no surpirse that if I search for "Opencart" on it's own I get opencart.com as the first result!

What I meant is very competitive terms (e.g. there's a site in the Live Shops section which is selling guitars. A term like "electric guitars" is highly competitive because there are loads of sites that sell them). What I meant is you don't tend to find any ecommerce sites built with Opencart that rank high on highly competitive key phrases.

ok. These also work:
payment and shipping module
cart mods contribs
realex module
gunpal module
etc

Also, note that opencart.com comes up searching for those and others like:
canada post module
australia post module
etc

Opencart's site uses the same framework as the cart

Q

I was concerned about this because I heard from some SEO sites that duplicate content is bad.

Here's some info from google regarding the matter:
http://www.google.com/support/webmaster ... swer=66359
and
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot. ... ntent.html

"in the vast majority of cases, the worst thing that'll befall webmasters is to see the "less desired" version of a page shown in our index."

So I suppose there's no reason to worry. I would still be interested to see if pagerank would be affected by eliminating the duplicate URLs ;]

Chris P Duck wrote: Hmm... that's quite a specific area though isn't it. I mean if I search for a company name, I pretty much expect to find the company website! It's no surpirse that if I search for "Opencart" on it's own I get opencart.com as the first result!

What I meant is very competitive terms (e.g. there's a site in the Live Shops section which is selling guitars. A term like "electric guitars" is highly competitive because there are loads of sites that sell them). What I meant is you don't tend to find any ecommerce sites built with Opencart that rank high on highly competitive key phrases.

tl;dr: The problem lies between the chair(s) and the keyboards at the company using OpenCart.

Chris,

You may also notice that many of the people that rank high on competitive search terms spend a great deal of money in advertising, and also generally either have outsourced copywriters and PR specialists or have teams of people that simply create and promote content to artificially generate interest and authority. Most people who use OpenCart do not have the resources to compete in a field like this.

Also, because of the oversaturation of the resale market, and the fact that most VARs (Value-Added Resellers) do not actually add any unique value to the product or service being marketed, it is very difficult (neigh impossible) to succeed in a bloated marketplace without finding a niche or specialized subset within this market. The problem you're describing is a result of OpenCart users not being willing/able to invest the time and resources necessary to grow their brand outside of creating their website. It's all about the off-site promotion, advertising, and content marketing.

For example, I have an OpenCart site which I launched less than 3 weeks ago (site redesign), and the site was quickly indexed by Google and shows up on the top page of both web and shopping for searches of local relevance. If someone searches for "Toner Cartridges (city near me)" or something similar, the top results are almost always my company or an article I wrote published on a 3rd-party website.

Searching for "search engine" on your favorite search engine will usually display the top search engines. It's not (necessarily) because the other ones are faulty, but because the big guns have the time and resources necessary to grow their brand and make it synonymous with "search engine".

as a real SEO consultant working on a opencart site I've read a fair few of the SEO articles in these forums and I couldnt sit back and watch any longer.

To answer to the first person's question. If you learn how google breaks down search queries and would read Matt Cutts blog you will quickly find that - are indeed better than _ for SEO. Just do a two word search down one like this:

The ft
The-ft
The_ft

The first two: The ft and the-ft will deliver the same results whilst the_ft wont. Its because of how Google strips the - from a string whilst it doesnt remove a _. Enough of that for now.

DUPLICATE CONTENT

Dupe content penalties do exist. But its only when your content is ripped off from another website i.e. scrapers and content farms. Not when you have the same content on your own site twice.

DUPE CONTENT IS BAD ON YOUR SITE and for the following reasons:

- Link Building: If you have links pointing to different URLs of the same product, its not as useful as having all the links pointing to one URL thus collecting all the link juice.

- The old Google spider. Google gives its spider a certain amount of time/data to crawl your site. If its wasting its time crawling dupe products/pages then its wasting time when it could be indexing useful pages/products.

TIPS:
- Learn to write a .htaccess file to at least show either the www. or non www. version of your site. Especially if you consider yourself a real SEO then you should be able to manipulate the code enough to sort it out. 301s for the win!

- Stop moaning. Im pretty sure open cart is free...so if you dont like it move on

the site I've just started working on is http://www.121sportnutrition.co.uk if you want to see how Im trying to optimise an open cart shop.

enjoy

Tom B

06 Sept
Hello anyone that can explain this SEO Keyword in Open Cart to me - I am new to the Open CArt and am finding many answers for this area...and it is so confusing now

SEO Keywords in Product Pages...If I change the current key word(s), will it change the URL?
SEO Keywords on CAtegory Pages - If I change the current keyword (s) will it change the URL

Now - Product pages
Product Title - Samsung Television
SEO Title - Buy Now online
SEO Title Page - Samsung Television Flat Screen (right or wrong?) does this have to be the same as the Product Title?

SEO KEYword - samsung-television-flat-screen

Anyone out there can put the light on the answers to my questions, simply? Would much appreciate