AlegroCart

Hi

My site has had a few google visitors these last few days, even though the site is far from ready, and I analyze what they have searched for on google and where they have landed on my site. There is a problem with moving products to new categories and indexing. I hope I haven't missed some setting but on moving a product to a different category the old url that has been indexed by google no longer points to any product at all - 404 error message. On forums etc when you move a topic to another forum and so on the old url is 'remembered' and the user is sent to the new location seamlessly. At the moment I will have to edit the htaccess file to get around this problem and put my own redirects in. Is there a setting I am missing somewhere or is this missing from the script?

Regards
Mark

Are you getting 404 error, or just product not found?

Are you getting 404 error, or just product not found?

Sorry not a 404 error just a product not found message. Isn't that what that is though?

If the old URL had the site-category-product and now you have moved to site-new category-product, no there is no history link to the new product location. You could add the redirect in the URL alias file, but if it is regenerated, all manual likes would disappear.
As google crawls your site often, it deletes the old links.

I will take another look at the url alias. So much more to this shopping script than I thought. Would still be a worthwhile feature upgrade though if product movements were catered for automatically and old urls just redirected.

It can take a while for google to reindex a site and in the meantime a visitor could and will end up on a non existant product page. Not good.

At the moment I will have to edit the htaccess file to get around this problem and put my own redirects in. Is there a setting I am missing somewhere or is this missing from the script?

There is nothing in the script that handles redirects when moving products from one category to another.
The URL alias generates the links based on the current product locations at the time it is generated. Once you move products and regenerate the aliases, the complete alias file is recreated.
You could manually add an alias to the URL alias file and deleted the old one, but these changes would disappear whenever the URL alias is regenerated. It's kind of a catch 22. It you have 2 links to a product, the old and the new location, google might penalize you for double linking a product. I feel it's best to have the new current link and let to old one be delisted when the site is next indexed. Some search engines have bad algorithms, and may take a very long time to delist a link if ever, but there is nothing you can do about that.

Thanks for the update! I nearly forgot to check this forum! Thanks God, I could find this thread!