Duplicate Content - Friendly URLs have negative impact?

[leehack]

If you have SPP setup, I think it's much easier to just link to the page, there is no requirement for page anchors either that way. That could be done on the desktop using php quite easily, so a static URL to the parent page of the product was just uploaded.

[Mike Hughes]

You're right Lee. Just linking straight to the product without going via the cgi-bin is the right way to do it.

I suspect we've been banging on about the problem of links going via the cgi-bin for something like 4-5 years now. Actinic is much better than it used to be, but there's still a problem with these best sellers.

I saw Gabe's solution but haven't really looked at it. If that writes the direct links then it's clearly one option. I'm unsure what the performance impact might be when actinic's creating the pages.

The best solution would be for actinic to get rid of the cgi-bin links themselves. I know the current solution makes it easy for them; just create a link the search script with the product ref and let that sort it out but a proper direct link shouldn't be hard to code up.

Mike

[leehack]

Definitely agree with that Mike and if they cast the smart theme menu to the sword also, i think we could genuinely block any cgi-bin activity on any actinic site and suffer nothing adverse from that point on.

These are the kind of things that should only take a couple of hours to perfect, I reckon I could do it in an hour or two and I suck at php big time. These fixes are cheap, quick, easy and add value to releases. I would fall on the floor if this came back with anything more than a 4 hour timeframe to create and add. If nothing else is possible, it can be done the dirty way with php like they do with pricing.

Falls into the same bracket as the inexplicable lack of pricing on a standard component. Again that's just an hour to add, it's already done in the forum.

From annoying little omissions like these, come bad perceptions. A whole load of small requirements could be added in one week, ridding these problems. Delay V10 by a week and have a developer working solely on getting rid of these annoying omissions. There would not be one actinic user who would not want that, will they do it though? we shall see....