Product Links Broken After Enabling Seo

Store Builder Questions
1

Hi there,



I enabled SEO addon a few months after my site went live, now many links search results from google are broken (the pages ranked very high, which means I am losing quite a bit of sales now).



For example, this link is broken:

http://www.australiangift.com.au/category-306/tasman-sea-super-marine-collagen-300mg-100.html?sl=en



I have about 46 products, around 20 categories. Each category contains a few products only.



I am thinking of redirecting broken links to its correct category page which will show a few products, perhaps with some code like:



if url matches category-306

{

redirect to http://www.australiangift.com.au/collagen/

}



Is it possible to do something like this?

Will redirecting the page affect my search engine ranking?





Thanks,

yong2014

2

You need to create 301 redirects for every page that has changed its URL. How long ago did you enable the SEO addon?

3

Here is a nice tool, that will help you with the redirects…



.HtAccess Redirect Generator - Bulk build 301 redirects - Free



…place the generated code in your .htaccess-file.

4

I think I enabled the SEO addon around 2 months ago.



The URLs are automatically generated by CS-Cart, I don't have a list of the old and new mappings without quite a bit of work.



Also at one stage I added the product price in the product name, CS-Cart generates URLs containing the product name (with the price), after I changed the price the URL was broken. (Now I no longer put the price in product name).



In short, for the same product I have several versions of broken URLs!! (I am new to managing an online shop)





If I can generate 301 redirect rules with regular expression pattern matching (e.g. matching /cat-305/* to /callagen), then it would be good, because the category number never changed, it's the actual product name details changed.

5

use google webmaster tools and check under crawl errors to see all 404 errors. This will give you a downloadable table of the old pages that have been 404.

You could also check in normal google.com search for site:www.australiangift.com.au for general idea if your other “NEW” seo pages have been crawled.



Then you can use the redirects as you see fit (remember you will then be generating more 404 errors for any newly “SEO” crawled pages when google cant find them if you alter those in any way)



John

6

Guys, thank you very much for your help!



I put some RedirectMatch 301 rules in .htaccess and the broken links are now redirecting to the correct page.



e.g:

RedirectMatch 301 /category-306/(.*) /collagen

7

[quote name='yong2014' timestamp='1413894519' post='194725']

Guys, thank you very much for your help!



I put some RedirectMatch 301 rules in .htaccess and the broken links are now redirecting to the correct page.



e.g:

RedirectMatch 301 /category-306/(.*) /collagen

[/quote]



And how about the old products, you have done those too right?

8

Hi Johnbol1,



By “old products” do you mean the old links? I always have the same products, it's just the URLs generated by CS-Cart got changed

  1. When I enabled SEO
  2. When I added price to the product name.



    I am now working on the rewrite rules for all the products.



    I don't understand why the product URLs still contain the price after I have already removed the price from the product name?



    For example, I used to have a product name “Aussia Soya Isoflavene 120 Capsules [color=#ff0000]$35.00[/color]”, this caused the URL to be as below:

    http://www.australiangift.com.au/all-products/aussia-soya-isoflavene-120-capsules-[color=#ff0000][b]35.00[/b][/color].html



    Now I have removed $35.00 from product name, the URL still “http://www.australiangift.com.au/all-products/aussia-soya-isoflavene-120-capsules-[color=#ff0000]35.00[/color].html”.



    How do I get CS-Cart to regenerate the URLs to reflect the product name without the price? I want to tidy this up.



    Yong2014
9

export the products with “seo field” to csv, remove all prices and import back in.

There used to be a bug in 2.25 where cs didnt update the seo name…maybe its still there



John

10

Changing a product name DOES NOT change the product's SEO name. To change the SEO name, click to edit the product, then choose the SEO tab. The top field there is SEO Name. Change the SEO name there. This will change the URL.



To edit them en masse, do like John said above. Go to Administration>Export Data>Products. Click “Clear Fields” below the left box of fields, which will leave you with just Product Code and Language. Then add SEO Name from the right hand list of fields. Then moving down the page, change the CSV delimiter to comma. Then at the top of the page click the blue Export button. Open the resulting CSV file in Excel and edit the SEO names how you want them. Then go to Administration>Import Data>Products and import the CSV file you just edited.

11

It seems that cs-cart somehow wasn't behaving consistently. At one stage I added the price to the product name, but I certainly didn't ask it to update the SEO name to include the price (I wasn't aware of “SEO name” field until today).



Then later I modified the product name to remove the price, but cs-cart didn't update the SEO name automatically this time.



I will use export and import to tidy this up.



Thanks a lot!