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 Include product name in shopexd url??
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PhoenixA
Starting Member

41 Posts

Posted - February 02 2005 :  13:52:10  Show Profile  Reply with Quote
Hi,

Anyone know how i could have the product name included in the shopexd url? I used to just add it by hand in at the end in my site map so my url would be mysite/store/shopexd.asp?id=40&Product-Name but now i'm using a rewrite program to change my urls to htm. At the moment on my site the above address would be mysite/store/40.htm but if i can find some way to have the cart include the product name in the address i should be able to have the rewrite program change the url to mysite/store/product-name.htm which would be a big help in the search engines.
I was thinking about something like putting the product name including linking the product name words with - in one of the extra fields on the product details page and then editing the code somewhere to add that at the end of the url with a & but i don't know what file to edit.
Any tips or advice on this would be greatly appreciated. Also all my product names start with my brand name so there is no two products with the same name so that won't be a problem. Thanks

devshb
Senior Member

United Kingdom
1904 Posts

Posted - February 03 2005 :  05:41:32  Show Profile  Visit devshb's Homepage  Reply with Quote
try:

product=stereos

just make sure that "stereos" is replaced with an encoded version of the name, you can find an encoded name by wrapping the name around Server.URLEncode

eg:

Response.Write "shopdisplayproducts.asp?product="&Server.URLEncode("stereos")

I'm not sure if you can also apply this to the product detail page, but you can definitely apply it to product summary searches (and hence make the link only come back with a single hit if the name's right)


eg:
on our site we've got a link to view the froogle products, which is in the format:

http://bigyellowzone.com/shopdisplayproducts.asp?product=froogle


if you're doing this dynamically through the html-generator or something similar, then just put server.URLEncode(cursor("cname")) in place of part of the html filename.

Simon Barnaby
Developer
[email protected]
www.BigYellowZone.com
Web Design, Online Marketing and VPASP addons

Edited by - devshb on February 03 2005 05:46:18
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shopcomputer
VP-CART New User

USA
57 Posts

Posted - February 03 2005 :  08:12:02  Show Profile  Visit shopcomputer's Homepage  Reply with Quote
I tried http://bigyellowzone.com/shopexd.asp?product=froogle, it works. The only time I think there may be a problem is, if there are 2 exact matches. This definetly would help search engine rankings. However we have 8000 products and can not create site map manually. It would be nice if shopdisplayproducts.asp would be able to link to the shopexd.asp using the product name.

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PhoenixA
Starting Member

41 Posts

Posted - February 04 2005 :  03:33:46  Show Profile  Reply with Quote
Hi Simon,

Thanks for that, i'm a little confused though. Can you please tell me how you got the page to include the word froogle in more detail, eg. what files you edited etc. What i need is for what ever files in vpasp that generate the shopexd url to add the product name at the end. Because our product name would have spaces such as Brand Product Name which might cause problems in a url i was thinking of entering every product name as it would be in the url (Brand-Product-Name) in an unused field on the product page such as other4 and then on what ever page that creates the shopexd url at the end of the url line adding something like &Other4 so the url would be something like: shopexd.asp?id=40&Brand-Product-Name which i could then use my rewrite software to change to Brand-Product-Name.htm which would be the ultimate page name for the search engines. If you can give me some pointers in very basic language on how i could do this that would be great. Thanks

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devshb
Senior Member

United Kingdom
1904 Posts

Posted - February 04 2005 :  05:24:45  Show Profile  Visit devshb's Homepage  Reply with Quote
if you want to make the product name part of the url line, then you could (if you were really sneaky!) use an argument that simply doesn't get used anywhere and is only used so that the search engines get a clearer idea of what it's supposed to point to.

for that, you'd change whatever it is that's creating your links (that'll depend on where your links are and how they're getting created; might be in a template file or in shopfileio.asp, or hard-coded somewhere in content files, or a combination of all of those).

you'd definitely need to use server.urlencode though when adding the argument otherwise the search engines might see it as an invalid url if it has spaces and other special characters in it.

that froogle-link was just a hard-coded thing (actually, not quite hard-coded because we use relative directories, but for simplicity's sake assume that it was just hard-coded)

something you might want to consider is creating a new template field which displays your customised product detail links and then using that in place of your default "more..." links etc; we use that for all our links because it means we can easily hack them about in a single/central place to use different syntax/formats/looks etc; for that we use an extra-template-field that we created, and that in turn uses our generic "create extra template fields" addon, see also:

http://www.bigyellowzone.com/absolutenm/templates/template_simple.aspx?articleid=15&zoneid=9

When we build things like those extra template fields we code-up 2 versions each calling a common function; one for using in templates, and one for calling from normal vbscript, so that you can use a common function in html templates as well as being able to use/call them in your asp content (side panels etc)

Simon Barnaby
Developer
[email protected]
www.BigYellowZone.com
Web Design, Online Marketing and VPASP addons

Edited by - devshb on February 04 2005 05:30:10
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atari
Starting Member

30 Posts

Posted - February 10 2005 :  15:57:51  Show Profile  Reply with Quote
check out my solution:
it looks cleaner to user, and is better for SEO, but is more of a hassle to manage:
all my exdpages have the url of there product name and mfg:

http://www.rackattack.com/exdthule-599xtr.asp?id=959
mfg = thule
product = 599xtr

this route was done old fashioned. Create a new asp page for every product, (yes, I have 1200 exdpages). But hey, google thinks I have tonnes of content, so it all works out.



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PhoenixA
Starting Member

41 Posts

Posted - February 15 2005 :  08:32:30  Show Profile  Reply with Quote
Thanks guys, actually i got around the problem by writing a rule in ISAPI_Rewrite to say when it sees a word just move it around a bit so my url store/shopexd.asp?id=40 now looks like store/Brand-Product-Name-40.htm and all i had to do then was hand type each url into my site map page with the product name and brand. When the url store/Brand-Product-Name-40.htm is requested the ISAPI_Rewrite rule just goes to page Store/shopexd.asp/id=40&Brand-Product-Name which works perfectly and google has already indexed all of my pages with the htm url and i'm glad to say it worked, they are all ranking really well.
Thanks

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