From my experience of dealing with over the counter (the web counter) shopping cart solutions that are written primarily in PHP, majority of them uses Apache Mod Re-write specifically to achieve that kind of behaviour. Google does take in to account (how
much, I don't know though) keywords in the URI. The closer they are to the domain name itself, the higher the consideration value.
We have a cart that uses it and the one that doesn't. We get a lot more pages from that one that does shop up on google index with good relevancy to products. The one that doesn't picks up only general terms primarily.
Just a thought...
PS still trying to solve issues with VS Pro and Unit Testing. Any help is greatly appreciated. I don't have 6K for Team Developer Edition. Please help if anyone knows a workaround.
The reasons why "Friendly URLs" are desirable go beyond simple SEO. However, with regard to SEO, having the product name in the URI serves two fundemental SEO purposes:
1. "On Page" - Matt Cutts confirmed a long time ago (2006), and there's tons of empirical evidence to support that, keywords in the URI help search engines gauge the "quality" of the page.
2. "Off Page" - Anyone linking to you must use keywords in their anchor and are much more likely to use them in the anchor text. In other words, unlike /product/123, /leather-boots helps to "theme" inbound links.
I'm not going to go into all the reasons, you can head over to WebmasterWorld for exhaustive discussion on that (I do), but the more specific the page, the more specific the URI should be if you are using keywords in your URI. IOW, this
/leather-boots
is better than, this
/outerwear/boots/leather-boots
The main reason is not so much that the latter is "bad", just that the former is so much more precise, i.e. no chance for confusion. This is also _very_ true of Page Title. The key in Page Title is not to water down the "money spot" which is the first word,
followed by the second word, etc. However, this is _no where near_ as vital in the URI as in the Page Title. IOW, there really is only marginal difference between the above two examples. So marginal that it wouldn't be worth worrying over if there was some
other reason that made the /outwear/boots format work better for other purposes. It's really a balance game you play. For example, recent tests have shown that (they think) all things being equal, shorter URI's perform better than longer URI's. Is this because
the shorter are more focused or because Google has some maximum length factor or because very long URI's trigger some type of "spammy" alert, or...
While you're trying to figure all that out your competitor released with what might have been an inferior URI scheme but he released... :)
On the other hand, using product name in the URI should be just as effective as using the title of your blog post in the URI instead of postid=123.
Also, dash/hyphen > underscore per the Cutts man and per the SERPS.
Oh, and one of the other reasons is that if your URI is "leather-boots" and the user entered a query of "leather boots", Google will BOLD those words in your result listing both reinforcing to the customer that your listing is relevant and also distinquishing
you from your competitors.
It's a very good thought and I will probably change the Product URL around as I agree - it's a bit of a pain right now and relies on strings, which I'm not too fond of.
alexvit
0 Points
4 Posts
SEO and "product" route
Jul 13, 2008 10:04 PM|LINK
Wouldn't it make sense to create a route to include the product name for the purposes of SEO?
As in category/subcategory/productname_-productcode
or even a route such as:
"productname_-productcode" without having to go through category/subcategory etc. Google isn't very fond of long routes.
Any thoughts?
HostingASPNe...
All-Star
15882 Points
2977 Posts
Re: SEO and "product" route
Jul 14, 2008 06:48 AM|LINK
Hello,
Are you sure that you will have benefit from this?
Regards
Free ASP.NET Examples and source code.
alexvit
0 Points
4 Posts
Re: SEO and "product" route
Jul 14, 2008 04:23 PM|LINK
From my experience of dealing with over the counter (the web counter) shopping cart solutions that are written primarily in PHP, majority of them uses Apache Mod Re-write specifically to achieve that kind of behaviour. Google does take in to account (how much, I don't know though) keywords in the URI. The closer they are to the domain name itself, the higher the consideration value.
We have a cart that uses it and the one that doesn't. We get a lot more pages from that one that does shop up on google index with good relevancy to products. The one that doesn't picks up only general terms primarily.
Just a thought...
PS still trying to solve issues with VS Pro and Unit Testing. Any help is greatly appreciated. I don't have 6K for Team Developer Edition. Please help if anyone knows a workaround.
techstyled
Member
3 Points
3 Posts
Re: SEO and "product" route
Jul 18, 2008 06:48 AM|LINK
The reasons why "Friendly URLs" are desirable go beyond simple SEO. However, with regard to SEO, having the product name in the URI serves two fundemental SEO purposes:
1. "On Page" - Matt Cutts confirmed a long time ago (2006), and there's tons of empirical evidence to support that, keywords in the URI help search engines gauge the "quality" of the page.
2. "Off Page" - Anyone linking to you must use keywords in their anchor and are much more likely to use them in the anchor text. In other words, unlike /product/123, /leather-boots helps to "theme" inbound links.
I'm not going to go into all the reasons, you can head over to WebmasterWorld for exhaustive discussion on that (I do), but the more specific the page, the more specific the URI should be if you are using keywords in your URI. IOW, this
/leather-boots
is better than, this
/outerwear/boots/leather-boots
The main reason is not so much that the latter is "bad", just that the former is so much more precise, i.e. no chance for confusion. This is also _very_ true of Page Title. The key in Page Title is not to water down the "money spot" which is the first word, followed by the second word, etc. However, this is _no where near_ as vital in the URI as in the Page Title. IOW, there really is only marginal difference between the above two examples. So marginal that it wouldn't be worth worrying over if there was some other reason that made the /outwear/boots format work better for other purposes. It's really a balance game you play. For example, recent tests have shown that (they think) all things being equal, shorter URI's perform better than longer URI's. Is this because the shorter are more focused or because Google has some maximum length factor or because very long URI's trigger some type of "spammy" alert, or...
While you're trying to figure all that out your competitor released with what might have been an inferior URI scheme but he released... :)
On the other hand, using product name in the URI should be just as effective as using the title of your blog post in the URI instead of postid=123.
Also, dash/hyphen > underscore per the Cutts man and per the SERPS.
Oh, and one of the other reasons is that if your URI is "leather-boots" and the user entered a query of "leather boots", Google will BOLD those words in your result listing both reinforcing to the customer that your listing is relevant and also distinquishing you from your competitors.
robconery
Participant
852 Points
195 Posts
Re: SEO and "product" route
Aug 14, 2008 10:05 PM|LINK
It's a very good thought and I will probably change the Product URL around as I agree - it's a bit of a pain right now and relies on strings, which I'm not too fond of.