search engine safe URL's & osCommerce

[Chunks]

Hi all,

i'am refering to this thread (http://forums.oscommerce.com/index.php?act=ST&f=12&t=63544) over in the oscommerce forums tips and tricks section.

i would really love to get this going on my installation of oscommerce, but the problem is i don't know a great deal about mod_rewrite, perhaps someone here can check that post and show me how to edit the .htaccess file to suit the powweb hosting enviroment. thanks alot..

oh i have been doing some experiments and noticed when i switched on safe URL's in the oscommerce admin, it did work sort of but not on every page... but i don't see how it should since i have not modified .htaccess file... strange... but good

Chunks

[Chunks]

Hi all,

i really really need to get this working, i'am willing to pay for some help or buy something of a wish list to get this done.

Please PM me so we can discuss payment options/price.

Thank you....
Chunks

[stevel]

As far as I know, the "Search engine safe URLs" option in admin does not require .htaccess changes, but I have not studied it in detail. I don't use that and the search engines have no trouble indexing my site.

[Chunks]

nope i'm 100% sure it does need the .htaccess & apache mod_rewrite functionality... please just read the link in the first post above to understand the whole story.

any one out there who can help?

Regards Chunks

[natural]

Maybe it won't work on shared servers.
I am with Steve, though, I don't need it. I have over 1000 pages indexed as dynamic and they rank well.

[stevel]

Google is strange... It had many of my product pages indexed, now it doesn't, but it does have the category pages (which are dynamic). But other search engines (Yahoo, MSN, etc.) have lots of my pages. I see Google crawling my site a lot, though, and figure the index will get updated eventually. It has old content for some of my pages.

The standard way that osC does URLs works fine with most search engines. Don't mess it up.

[Chunks]

Hi all,

thanks for the feed back...

i'am however well aware that search engine are able to index dynamic URL's... but nowhere nearly effective as using dynamic fixed URL's (if that makes sense...)

so my offer still stands to pay for some help to get this done....

Regards Chunks

[tacimala]

stevel how do you know when Google is crawling your site? I've seen people on other forums discussing this type of thing but I'm just wondering if there is a way to know when they are doing it.

[Chunks]

Go into your OPS Control Panel enable Webstats - i recomend Awstats, once this is installed(automatically installed by powweb) your will be able to see all statistic about your site including search engine hits

easy...

Chunks

[tacimala]

That's not what I was referring to...I can see that they are crawling my site and I see that my site is indexed by Google, but I was just wondering if there was a tool or way of knowing when my site was being spidered. Is it done just by looking at the log files themselves?

[natural]

There is no tool for that. You have to check your logs. Different sites get spidered in different intervals. My website is sppidered daily.
I suggest that you get some high PR links to your site and then google will be finding you often.

[Chunks]

hi all...

i have managed to get Search Engine Safe URL's working

http://shop.acedata.com.au

if anyone wants to know how... they are welcome to post on to this thread if you want... but thread has sort got off to a bad start.... so i suggest start a new thread and i can assist with setting up Static URL's as time permits...

Regards Chunks

P.S. Quiet easy i found... very little modification's required...

[jadamson]

Chunks,
Would like some insight on how you fixed the problem.
Thanks,
Jeff

[stevel]

BTW, Google is now indexing my site just fine, and I am getting lots of incoming hits. I didn't use SEF URLs, which seem to cause more problems than they solve.