Seo And Cloned Product Names

Why don't SEO names update when you change a product title?

Our vendors use the product Cloning feature when adding large groups of similar products - but it appends [CLONE] to the end of the product name. If they delete it from the product name, it still ends up in the SEO name and file path.

Why, oh why, doesn't CS-Cart just update the SEO name on a product title save? I know that it now builds a redirect everytime you edit the SEO name - is it to avoid overloading the number of redirect entries?

The downside here is we hide the SEO naming field from vendors as they don't understand the implications of it, so it becomes another maintenance task for the store owner to do.

Because it's an "initialization", not a setting. There is no requirement for an seo-name to have any relationship to a title. It is only done when the seo-name is empty.

You can easily use the 'update_product_pre' PHP hook to force the SEO name value to whatever you want, but doing so as a default would destroy many sites and give many unintended results.

Why don't SEO names update when you change a product title?

Our vendors use the product Cloning feature when adding large groups of similar products - but it appends [CLONE] to the end of the product name. If they delete it from the product name, it still ends up in the SEO name and file path.

Why, oh why, doesn't CS-Cart just update the SEO name on a product title save? I know that it now builds a redirect everytime you edit the SEO name - is it to avoid overloading the number of redirect entries?

The downside here is we hide the SEO naming field from vendors as they don't understand the implications of it, so it becomes another maintenance task for the store owner to do.

Hello!

Our SEO Templates add-on will help you. You can create the template and configure cron that will update the product seo names using the formula you specified in the template. You can update not only seo name but also page title, meta description, meta keywords and alt text of the main image.

Because it's an "initialization", not a setting. There is no requirement for an seo-name to have any relationship to a title. It is only done when the seo-name is empty.

You can easily use the 'update_product_pre' PHP hook to force the SEO name value to whatever you want, but doing so as a default would destroy many sites and give many unintended results.

I'm not sure why you don't see the issue here.

The SEO title *is* public facing - it forms the product's path name, visible in the browser.

So even if the vendor revises the product name in the course of creating a new product based on a standing one, the SEO title and URL for the product remains named after the product that was cloned.

It's entirely unintuitive and certainly potentially confusing to customers and vendors.

Wouldn't it make a whole lot more sense to re-write the SEO title / path when the product title has been revised and saved?

cheers

Only if your SEO name is built from a set of rules using other data. Not all sites/products are done that way so forcing it to do so would break those sites

Why not simply use a hook to build your seo name on a product update and then compare it to what exists. If it's different, replace it and add the 301 for the old name. If not, leave it alone. You'd also have to verify that the new name doesn't exist from an old update in the redirect table. That fixes your issue and doesn't break everyone else. This could be done with about 1hr of development time.

Some people include the product name, others have the product code and for others, it is free form. And for still others that may use a product that is widely available, they might duplicate the seo name from a competitive site in order to capitalize on their rankings and that may not relate to any of their product data.

If you want to "template" your seo name generation, then simply buy/use the Simtech addon above if it meets your needs.

I guess my point is that for a "product", you need to take the least-destructive path when making changes. Imagine if you were one of the merchants whose site got blasted with the introduction of new automatic field generation.... All of a sudden, all the rankings you spent years building plunge to zero.

I think the current implementation is correct. I.e. it generates a name if none exists and ignores if if it does exist. But that's just my opinion. That's why we have a "discussion forum".

Yes, I understand we wouldn't want to automatically overwrite SEO data on product name revisions.

I guess perhaps I'm suggesting there might be a special case for Cloned products - which are effectively *new* products without an SEO history to damage.

I believe there is some value to looking at CS-Cart as a consumer product, especially in its MVE mode, where users are potentially not technically savvy, and these kinds of unintuitive aspects of the application could be refined.

I concur with your assessment related to the first save of a cloned order. Good luck getting it in the standard cart.

If it's important to you, hire a developer for 1 to 2 hours (like me) and have them do it for you using hooks. It should be pretty easy to set it using your defined elements. The tricky part is knowing that you need to do it on the first save AFTER the initial clone and then to ignore it (or always validate it meets your specs).