Are Search Engine Friendly Product URLs Possible

Hi All,

I'm about to start setting up my first PowerStore (using v3). I am an SEO person and when looking at other PowerStore sites by people here I notice that the product page URLs and category URLs are not very search engine friendly because they contain characters like ? = etc. Although this does not mean pages won't ever get indexed, it can delay or reduce SEO effectiveness.

Does anyone know how to make the URLs search engine friendly? I'm not a developer but if no one here has done it I might have to hire someone to do it. Is there a setting in PowerStore to make it generate better URLs?

If this is something not yet available then I would strongly urge that the next version have this ability. This can be very important for search engine optimization purposes.

If I've missed the info on how to do this then please show me where it is and feel free to take the p**s and ridicule me for being so dumb.

Cheers,
Adam

The reason that the urls are generated this way is because the product pages use one page and get the information dynamically based on the url parameters (the stuff after the "?"). To generate more seo friendly urls, you would have to modify the functionality of the site greatly and create a new page for each of the products.

My apologies, it was pointed out by a colleague that you can use mod_rewrite to get search engine friendly urls. Here is a tutorial on that, and you can also find a lot of other documentation on mod_rewrite online:
mod_rewrite

Hi Jimmy,

I was going to post about mod rewrite but you already replied again. Thanks for checking on this for me.

Adam

if you are interested, i found this book really interesting and informative.

Professional-Search-Engine-Optimization-with-PHP-A-Developer-s-Guide-to-SEO.productCd-0470100923.html

Thanks for the recommedation, I'll check it out.

I have been testing mod_rewrite on my local server and have got the examples presented at mod_rewrite (thanks Jimmy) to work. What is the next step to modify PowerStore to use this? Is anyone successfully using mod-rewrite with a PowerStore site?

Thanks

The next step would be to rewrite the product page urls that you get for each product. This way when the page is accessed, it is accessed through a search friendly url.

i don't pretend to be an expert on this, but this is a site i wrote about a year ago, and the product categories and detail pages all use 'friendly' urls.

i got this from the book i mentioned earlier.

blunique.co.uk