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    SEO Friendly URL and Canonical Recommendations

    I have been sent this to implement from the SEO company commissioned by a client. I would like to know any views you people may have? Tech Support say that it is customisation and therefore not supported. Has anyone any supportive ideas?
    - Canonical tag to be included on all pages.

    As many pages can be accessed through a ‘friendly’ url as well as the cgi-bin url, this created duplicate content so we need to tell the search engines which page is the original.

    If there is a variable to output the ‘friendly’ url, it should be used to produce the following in the <head> of each page;

     <link rel="canonical" href="http://www.xxxxxxxx.com/acatalog/Red_Ella_Over_The_Bust_Corset_With_Lace.html" />


    - Header: add link to logo, set link href to “/” (for usability).

    - Header: change Home link href to “/”, change Products href to “/acatalog/”.

    - Sidebars: change ‘Website Home’ link href to “/”.

    - Page URLs – all pages (except shopping cart/checkout, members login and search related pages) should have a ‘friendly’ url version that doesn’t use the /cgi-bin/ss000001.pl URL, and be linked to at this friendly URL.

    All products on the home page, and various product descriptions link to the cgi-bin URL of pages; these must be updated.

    Ideally we want to remove references to the cgi-bin (except as described above), then block search engines from that section of the website.
    Thank You
    Jonathan Chappell
    Website Designer
    SellerDeck Website Designer
    Actinic to SellerDeck upgrades
    Graphicz Limited - www.graphicz.co.uk

    #2
    This should work for the section pages:
    <link rel="canonical" href="http://www.domain.co.uk/acatalog/<actinic:variable name="SectionURL" />"/>

    and this for the brochure pages:
    <link rel="canonical" href="http://www.domain.co.uk/<actinic:variable name="BrochurePageURL" />"/>

    You'll need to place blockifs around each page type to stop coding errors.

    Comment


      #3
      Thanks for that, that is a real help. Please can you enlarge on the blockifs if possible?

      There is a similar question here that has been unanswered: http://community.actinic.com/showthread.php?t=48210

      Thanks very much
      Jonathan Chappell
      Website Designer
      SellerDeck Website Designer
      Actinic to SellerDeck upgrades
      Graphicz Limited - www.graphicz.co.uk

      Comment


        #4
        Put the following before the closing </head> tag:

        Code:
        <actinic:block if="%3cactinic%3avariable%20name%3d%22BrochurePageID%22%20%2f%3e%20%3e%200" >
        	<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.domain.co.uk/<actinic:variable name="BrochurePageURL" />"/>
        </actinic:block>
        <actinic:block if="%3cactinic%3avariable%20name%3d%22SectionID%22%20%2f%3e%20%3e%200">
        	<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.domain.co.uk/acatalog/<actinic:variable name="SectionURL" />"/>
        </actinic:block>

        Comment


          #5
          The blockifs still produced errors. This seemed to work OK
          Code:
          <actinic:block if="%3cactinic%3avariable%20name%3d%22PageType%22%20%2f%3e%20%3d%3d%20%27Brochure%27" >
          	<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/<actinic:variable 
          
          name="BrochurePageURL" />"/>
          </actinic:block>
          <actinic:block if="%3cactinic%3avariable%20name%3d%22PageType%22%20%2f%3e%20%3d%3d%20%22Section%22" >
          	<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/acatalog/<actinic:variable 
          
          name="SectionURL" />"/>
          </actinic:block>
          Many thanks again.
          Jonathan Chappell
          Website Designer
          SellerDeck Website Designer
          Actinic to SellerDeck upgrades
          Graphicz Limited - www.graphicz.co.uk

          Comment


            #6
            File names

            By the way, if you want Google to parse your filename as separate words use a hyphen instead of an underscore, otherwise it treats your filename as one long word.
            Steve Griggs.

            "People in business often miss opportunities, mainly because they usually arrive dressed in overalls and looking like work."



            www.kitchenwareonline.com
            www.microwave-repair.co.uk

            Comment


              #7
              Unfortunately Drounding's solution has produced the following and got the SEO people screeching at me? Any other ideas?
              Code:
              <link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/acatalog/http://www.example.com/cgi-bin/ss000001.pl?SECTIONID=sectionpagename.html&amp;NOLOGIN=1"/>
              Jonathan Chappell
              Website Designer
              SellerDeck Website Designer
              Actinic to SellerDeck upgrades
              Graphicz Limited - www.graphicz.co.uk

              Comment


                #8
                Originally posted by graphicz View Post
                Unfortunately Drounding's solution has produced the following and got the SEO people screeching at me? Any other ideas?
                Code:
                <link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/acatalog/http://www.example.com/cgi-bin/ss000001.pl?SECTIONID=sectionpagename.html&amp;NOLOGIN=1"/>
                Try this it works in V10
                Code:
                <link rel="canonical" href="<actinic:variable name="CatalogURL" /><actinic:variable name="SectionPageName" />" />
                , generates the section name

                Malcolm

                SellerDeck Accredited Partner,
                SellerDeck 2016 Extensions, and
                Custom Packages

                Comment


                  #9
                  Thanks a million Malcolm, that seems to do the trick!

                  Steve - I like that idea. Actinic puts the underscores in the section name automatically to create the URLs. Can one change the way Actinic does that to make it use hyphens or do you do it manually for each section?

                  Than you all very much.
                  Jonathan Chappell
                  Website Designer
                  SellerDeck Website Designer
                  Actinic to SellerDeck upgrades
                  Graphicz Limited - www.graphicz.co.uk

                  Comment


                    #10
                    Originally posted by graphicz View Post
                    Actinic puts the underscores in the section name automatically to create the URLs. Can one change the way Actinic does that to make it use hyphens or do you do it manually for each section?

                    Than you all very much.
                    I think this has to be done manually, although seem to remember reading very recently that this was going to be changed, although can not find the related post so am unsure if this was for V11 or the next version of V10.
                    Darren Guppy
                    Golf Tee Warehouse
                    Golf Tees and Golf Accessories.

                    Comment


                      #11
                      I now remember where I read about changing underscores to hyphens, it was on Page 7 of the "Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) with Actinic
                      " breakout session pdf document:http://www.actinic.co.uk/docs/user_c...th_actinic.pdf

                      v11 shortlist
                      Hyphen instead of underscore in page names
                      • Number copied pages – ‘page-1’, ‘page-2’ instead of
                      ‘copy_of_copy_of_’
                      • Page Titles
                      – Unique
                      – Section Names only
                      – Online Catalogue page
                      • Remove Heading tag anomalies
                      • ? XML site map
                      • ? Breadcrumb trail ‘rich snippets’
                      • ? Image renaming facility
                      • ? Limited CSS improvements / file size reduction
                      Darren Guppy
                      Golf Tee Warehouse
                      Golf Tees and Golf Accessories.

                      Comment


                        #12
                        The brochure page link produced
                        Code:
                        http://www.example.com/../index.html
                        So a little modificatuin produced the following which seems to be ok:
                        Code:
                        <actinic:block if="%3cactinic%3avariable%20name%3d%22IsBrochureHomePage%22%20%2f%3e">
                        <link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/index.html" />	
                        </actinic:block>
                        <actinic:block if="%3cactinic%3avariable%20name%3d%22IsBrochureHomePage%22%20%2f%3e%20%3d%3d%20false">
                        <actinic:block if="%3cactinic%3avariable%20name%3d%22PageType%22%20%2f%3e%20%3d%3d%20%27Brochure%27" >
                        <link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/<actinic:variable name="BrochurePageURL" />" />
                        </actinic:block>
                        </actinic:block>
                        <actinic:block if="%3cactinic%3avariable%20name%3d%22PageType%22%20%2f%3e%20%3d%3d%20%22Section%22" >
                        	<link rel="canonical" href="<actinic:variable name="CatalogURL" /><actinic:variable name="SectionPageName" />" />
                        </actinic:block>
                        Thanks again
                        Jonathan Chappell
                        Website Designer
                        SellerDeck Website Designer
                        Actinic to SellerDeck upgrades
                        Graphicz Limited - www.graphicz.co.uk

                        Comment


                          #13
                          Note if using SellerDeck filtering “make filtering the default view” the URL changes to a cgi-bin link and requires 301 redirects or a canonical tag, but the canonical tag cannot use the variables store folder and page name for filtered pages as it causes a problem for search engines listings as they are unable to index content. See: http://community.sellerdeck.com/showthread.php?t=55375
                          Peblaco

                          Comment

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