None of my products have an entry in Add-ons … Canonical url field should this field have a url in place, if so what should be there?
I have ccart rocks Ultimate 3 installed if this makes a difference.
u can manually fill the canonical field yourself if you disabled the product and point the old url juice to the new product. Google will then realise to drop that product and use the new one. Its a 301 redirect
Sorry johnbol1 i don't understand what you mean.
I thought the re direct code i've placed in the .htaccess file transferred search engines to a new url OR are you saying the canonical url field box is for this purpose?
Yes, cs cart rocks addon does this, if you disable the old product, and add the full url to the new product you want to redirect to in thte canonical field.
Should the url i put in the canonical field be shown once it has been saved. The reason i ask is because after clicking the save button the text in the canonical field disappears and the field box is empty?
Open a product you are going to disable.
open the new product in the front end that you want it to forward to after disabling
copy the FULL url from the new product in the front end
Paste the full url into the canonical field of the old product and save changes
Disable the old product.
now when you visit the old disabled product url in the front end it will automatically re direct to the new one
John
My host company say it's better from an SEO perspective to do 301 redirects in .htaccess file rather than use the canonical url.
Would this advice be correct?
Has anybody had experience between the two redirect methods.
when the product is disabled and canonical field is used, this returns a 301 itself. SO no it isnt better or worse from what I understand.
And also remember 404s are not the big hoo haa they are made out to be by some. Millions of pages are 404'd everyday around the web, it is expected