SEO Url for Zencart
Dynamic Url vs Static Url
Lets start by going back a few years to the dawn of the Internet, when PHP, ASP, or any type of server-side scripting language is still relative new or non-exist. Most websites around that time would have only a handful number of pages, each page is a html file with static url. A static URL is one that does not change, so it typically does not contain any url parameters. It can look like this:
Updating and maintaining these pages can be very time consuming, since every single page has to be hard-coded.
Over the years, with the aid of scripting language, we can have the same page displaying different content depending on the url parameters. This is what we call dynamic url. Zencart uses dynamic url, a typical Zencart url looks like this:
Search Engines used to have problem(s) indexing dynamic urls, thus webmasters employed various techniques to convert dynamic urls to static urls, which are also called Search Engine Optimized urls (SEO urls)
Anything wrong with dynamic urls then?
Nothing wrong with dynamic url. It has been known that Search Engines used to have problem crawling sites with dynamic urls, but this is no longer the case. Google itself confirmed that it can crawl dynamic urls just fine. However, dynamic urls have some disadvantages:
- Different URLs can have the same content, so different users might link to URLs with different parameters which have the same content. This is what we call “duplicated” content. Google mentioned this on their blog:
In the rare cases in which we perceive that duplicate content may be shown with intent to manipulate our rankings and deceive our users, we’ll also make appropriate adjustments in the indexing and ranking of the sites involved. However, we prefer to focus on filtering rather than ranking adjustments … so 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.
If you are familiar with the way Zencart works, you will notice that links to a product page with or without the category id will display the same content. To make it worse, if you put a wrong category id in the link, it still displays the same content (a real life example would be: you move your product to a different category, yet the old link still displays just fine). Are Google and other Search Engines smart enough to know that these page are actually the same page? We never know.(update: check the new link at the end of this post)
- Urls with dynamic parameters are not user-friendly. For example, compare the 2 links below:
http://www.site.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=40_44&products_id=506http://www.site.com/toyota-c-40_44/2009-toyota-prius-hybrid
-p-506Lets ignore the special character “-c-”and “-p-” in the link for now, we will go back to that later, you will notice that the second link is more meaningful to user. You know the content you should see when you visit that link.
- The third problem we have is a specific problem with Zencart’s created urls. For example, during the seasonal shopping spree, you want to promote a specific product or category, it’s easy to do so on the web, but lets consider the case that you want to advertise on radio or television or newspager: can you give your customer a link like this:
http://www.site.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=40_44&products_id=506
Certainly you would prefer to give your customers a shorter, easy to remember link such as
http://www.site.com/xmas-sale
So using static urls is always better?
Not exactly, you may want to avoid using static urls if
- It somehow breaks your website at some place.
- It has un-desired effect on your (Search Engines’) ranking.
- You have been using dynamic urls for a while, and those urls have been indexed and well-ranked on certain keywords you want. While you can use 301 redirection (and most Zencart’s SEO modules use this method), it seems like you may lose your ranking for at least a certain amount of time until the Search Engines update the new links.
Note: Throughout this article, I have never mentioned that using static urls will help to boost your pages’s ranking on Search Engines, because it is NOT true. No one was able to confirm this effect; while many people have some good result using static urls, others may see some unexpected effect(read: bad). Please consider using static urls mainly for User Friendly, not Search Engine Friendly purpose.
Next time I will review the SEO URL modules currently available for Zencart users, and try to analyze the pros and cons of each.
(For more info regarding Static Urls vs Dynamic Urls you can read this Google’s blog post)
(Read the Google blog post regarding duplicated content penalty)
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[...] ago I wrote an article comparing Zencart’s Static Urls VS default Dynamic Urls. My conclusion at that time was that there was little difference in SEO effect between the 2 types. [...]
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[...] ago I wrote an article comparing Zencart’s Static Urls VS default Dynamic Urls. My conclusion at that time was that there was little difference in SEO effect between the 2 types. [...]
[...] ago I wrote an article comparing Static Urls (also called Seo Urls) and Dynamic Urls for Zencart. My conclusion at that time was that there was little difference in SEO effect between the 2 types. [...]
[...] ago I wrote an article comparing Zencart’s Static Urls VS default Dynamic Urls. My conclusion at that time was that there was little difference in SEO effect between the 2 types. [...]
[...] ago I wrote an article comparing Zencart’s Static Urls VS default Dynamic Urls. My conclusion at that time was that there was little difference in SEO effect between the 2 types. [...]
[...] ago I wrote an article comparing Zencart’s Static Urls VS default Dynamic Urls. My conclusion at that time was that there was little difference in SEO effect between the 2 types. [...]
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[...] ago I wrote an article comparing Static Urls (also called Seo Urls) and Dynamic Urls for Zencart. My conclusion at that time was that there was little difference in SEO effect between the 2 types. [...]
[...] ago I wrote an article comparing Static Urls (also called Seo Urls) and Dynamic Urls for Zencart. My conclusion at that time was that there was little difference in SEO effect between the 2 types. [...]
[...] ago I wrote an article comparing Static Urls (also called Seo Urls) and Dynamic Urls for Zencart. My conclusion at that time was that there was little difference in SEO effect between the 2 types. [...]
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