How To Get Rid Of Duplicated Categories But Save Seo Information

I have a nested list of categories which is a list of artist names. The main category is “Artists” and then there are letter subcategories going through the alphabet. So under Artists there is A (0 prods) and under A there is, e.g. Akiko Anzai (3 prods). There are a few hundred artist names alphabetized this way. I now have several copies of this list in the categories section and will need to disable and remove the dupes. (I had been having trouble with product and image imports with csv files and in the process of working with the database I exported and reimported all product records, which I think created the duplicate categories.) Problem is that the original list has SEO information for the artists which had been manually entered but the products are now associated mostly with the new categories. A few are still associated with the old categories. Also, there is an artist page with links copied from the artist category. So I want to restore the products to original categories and delete the new categories which have the products but none of the SEO information. If I delete the new categories will the products associated with them appear under the original set of categories? Thanks for any insights.

products are actually associated with categories via links (DB references). Each product has 1 main category and an infinate number of alternate categories.



The SEO name for a product is a property of the product, not the category (unless you've told the SEO engine to use categories in the pathnames of the product). So shifting what categories a product is in doesn't affect SEO. However if you do use the categories in the URL then you will have to create 301 redirects for every category;product that you've deleted.



This is why I recommend NOT using the category name in the SEO URL since it's a pain to maintain.

[quote name='tbirnseth' timestamp='1418254289' post='199407']

products are actually associated with categories via links (DB references). Each product has 1 main category and an infinate number of alternate categories.



The SEO name for a product is a property of the product, not the category (unless you've told the SEO engine to use categories in the pathnames of the product). So shifting what categories a product is in doesn't affect SEO. However if you do use the categories in the URL then you will have to create 301 redirects for every category;product that you've deleted.



This is why I recommend NOT using the category name in the SEO URL since it's a pain to maintain.

[/quote]



Thanks for reply. I meant the information found in the category tabs (description, page title, meta description, meta keywords).

[quote name='tbirnseth' timestamp='1418254289' post='199407']





This is why I recommend NOT using the category name in the SEO URL since it's a pain to maintain.

[/quote]



Ditto! I learned that the hard way a while back

I recently changed mine over. CS-Cart 4.24 did a pretty good job of automatically creating 301 redirects, but we found many that weren't fixed and had to manually create them. I used a combo of Google crawl errors and an Ad Words script to find bad urls. Ad Words does not like any redirects, so we had to rework a lot of links there.



Jack