Hello,
We are adding some new products and contemplating having static urls for the products rather than them be dynamically generated with the product id. The current product detail url is like this: https://www.mysitename.com/proddetail.asp?prod=prodid12345-red
The site is on ASP, has dashes in the prod id's for existing products that are on the site, and is redirected to SSL / HTTPs. The intent is to move the product detail page to an url like so:
https://www.mysitename.com/red-countertop-product

I am looking for some feedback with the following questions / considerations:

If I enable the perquisite includes and modify category and product ASP pages from instructions (here : https://www.ecommercetemplates.com/seo/search-engine-friendly-urls-asp.asp ), will this enforce a change on existing products, categories, etc? I guess my question is - is there a way to limit the enforcement of URL redirection? I see that the displayed products have an option for "has static URL" - If I create these URL modification Rules in the includes etc, will it only enforce it on the products with this field checked?





Joe

Hi Joetuesday, you can use has Static URL with seo urls and the static url will take precedent while items without static url will use the dynamically generated url.

Winners never quit, quitters never win
CSS and Responsive Designs
User Manual for Ecommerce Templates

Hello - In this case - the dynamically generated url will be the original default url like so "https://www.mysitename.com/proddetail.asp?prod=prodid12345-red"? - or some newly fashioned dynamic version? So I guess I am asking - if i put those redirects in - does the software only apply the rules to the products that have "has static url" selected? Thank you.

Joe

Hi you can use both SEO friendly urls and static urls, however items with dashes should be setup to use static urls.

Winners never quit, quitters never win
CSS and Responsive Designs
User Manual for Ecommerce Templates

Hello - I think i conflated the ideas of SEO friendly urls and static urls. I did some research - and it looks to me - that if I add seodetailurls=TRUE to includes - it affects all product detail urls. I would just like to be able to modify the urls of products I am going to add so that they are using the mask of "Has Static URL" field. If I just want to create static URLS for new products, what steps should I take? Do I still need to clone relevant asp pages and use explicit id etc - or should adding the static url name in adminprods.asp take care of it? Newly created pages with data in the static url field are 404'ing. What I am trying to accomplish is an URL like so https://www.mysitename.com/red-countertop-product - where i would have entered "red-countertop-product" in the "Has Static Url" field. Are my intentions in line with the way the shopping cart works?

Joe

Hi you can also setup static url as outlined here https://www.ecommercetemplates.com/seo/static-url-asp.asp

Winners never quit, quitters never win
CSS and Responsive Designs
User Manual for Ecommerce Templates

Hi Sinbad. Thank you for the feedback. Is it possible to scrub or remove the ".asp" from the url for new content / products we create?

Joe

Joe

Hi Joe, the built in SEO Friendly urls do that, https://www.ecommercetemplates.com/seo/search-engine-friendly-urls-asp.asp

I would imagine it can be done with a bunch of url rewirte directives in the IIS or web config file but that's something out of the scope of the software support.

Winners never quit, quitters never win
CSS and Responsive Designs
User Manual for Ecommerce Templates

Hello,
Is it possible to assign SEO friendly urls to only certain products? I have existing pages that I don't really want to redirect at the moment - so my use case is probably different than intended. If I want to have dynamically generated product detail page URLs for only certain products - is that possible?

So going forward - I want to create new products with SEO friendly urls, but I don't want to get bogged down with re-directing everything that has already been created without seo-friendly urls. Do you know of a way to accomplish this?

Joe

Hi Joe

Just to clear up a couple of things in the thread here.

You can't have static URLs and extensionless URLs on the same site for product detail pages, you'll have to use one or the other.

Products with a hyphen in the name would need the hyphen removing before using the extensionless URLs.

Andy

Please feel free to review / rate our software

Hello - Thank you for clearing that up. Is it possible to have a static url without the .asp extension? Would I have to manually 301 re-direct pages (in web.config or some other means) if this is what I want?

Joe

Joe

I can't see how you can have a static page without the .asp extension but I'm not sure there's too much advantage in having that really. I may not have been clear earlier. You can't use the Has Static Page checkbox with extensionless URLs - The Has Static URL is available, and we have an example here https://www.ecommercetemplates.com/asp-updater.asp - compare that to the extensionless detail pages we have eg https://www.ecommercetemplates.com/Responsive-Design-Styles-Ecomm-Plus

Andy

Please feel free to review / rate our software

Andy,
Thank you. Can you apply extensionless urls to only a subset of pages (chosen product detail pages for instance) or can it only apply site wide? Thanks.

Joe

Joe

You could just choose to use them for product detail pages as we have on ECT - we don't use them for category or product pages. You couldn't just use it on a few detail pages though unless those other detail pages were set up using the Has Static URL.

Andy

Please feel free to review / rate our software

I'm trying to follow the instructions at https://www.ecommercetemplates.com/seo/search-engine-friendly-urls-asp.asp
Since my site does have a SSL I added the following to products.asp and categories.asp directly above the <head> tag:
<base href="http<% if request.servervariables("HTTPS")="on" then response.write "s"%>://www.i-cubeinc.com/" />
Side issue - it is highlighted in yellow as is the case when not editable.

I also added the following to includes.asp; the last line is commented out per the instructions to conform functionality prior to taking that step.
' SEO Options
seodetailurls=TRUE
seocategoryurls=TRUE
detlinkspacechar="-"
seocaturlpattern="/category/%s"
seoprodurlpattern="/products/%s"
seomanufacturerpattern="/manufacturer/%s"
<!--seourlsthrow301=TRUE-->

At first, I followed the instructions regarding changes to web.config but when the site didn't work, read more closely and think that is another option, not something also done so I changed it back. Please confirm if that is true.

Products and categories both throw 404 errors.

Thank you,
Steve

Hi Steve

You will need to make changes to the web.config file - what did you have there?

Andy

Please feel free to review / rate our software

Thanks Andy - below is what I had edited it to prior to changing back. This includes the original lines of code plus those added:
<rewrite>
<rules>
<rule name="Categories Match" stopProcessing="true">
<match url="^category/([^/]*)/?$" />
<action type="Rewrite" url="categories.asp?cat={UrlEncode:{R:1}}" />
</rule>
<rule name="Product Match" stopProcessing="true">
<match url="^products/([^/]*)/?$" />
<action type="Rewrite" url="products.asp?cat={UrlEncode:{R:1}}" />
</rule>
<rule name="Manufacturer Match" stopProcessing="true">
<match url="^manufacturer/([^/]*)/?$" />
<action type="Rewrite" url="products.asp?man={UrlEncode:{R:1}}" />
</rule>
<rule name="Product Detail Page Match" stopProcessing="true">
<match url="^([^/]+)/?$" />
<conditions>
<add input="{URL}" pattern="\.asp" negate="true" />
<add input="{URL}" pattern="\.css" negate="true" />
</conditions>
<action type="Rewrite" url="proddetail.asp?prod={UrlEncode:{R:1}}" />
</rule>
</rules>
</rewrite>

Is that the full content of web.config file, nothing else?

Andy

Please feel free to review / rate our software

Yes - this is what was on there prior to editing and currently since I changed it back:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<configuration>
<system.webServer>
<handlers>
<remove name="PHP_via_FastCGI" />
<add name="PHP_via_FastCGI" path="*.php" verb="*" modules="FastCgiModule" scriptProcessor="D:\PHP\5.6\php-cgi.exe" resourceType="Either" />
</handlers>
</system.webServer>
</configuration>
This is what was subsequently added, after download and unzip per instructions:
<configuration>
<system.webServer>
<rewrite>
<rules>
<rule name="Categories Match" stopProcessing="true">
<match url="^category/([^/]*)/?$" />
<action type="Rewrite" url="categories.asp?cat={UrlEncode:{R:1}}" />
</rule>
<rule name="Product Match" stopProcessing="true">
<match url="^products/([^/]*)/?$" />
<action type="Rewrite" url="products.asp?cat={UrlEncode:{R:1}}" />
</rule>
<rule name="Manufacturer Match" stopProcessing="true">
<match url="^manufacturer/([^/]*)/?$" />
<action type="Rewrite" url="products.asp?man={UrlEncode:{R:1}}" />
</rule>
<rule name="Product Detail Page Match" stopProcessing="true">
<match url="^([^/]+)/?$" />
<conditions>
<add input="{URL}" pattern="\.asp" negate="true" />
<add input="{URL}" pattern="\.css" negate="true" />
</conditions>
<action type="Rewrite" url="proddetail.asp?prod={UrlEncode:{R:1}}" />
</rule>
</rules>
</rewrite>
</system.webServer>
</configuration>

If you need to combine it with existing rules it looks like it should be like this

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<configuration>
<system.webServer>
<handlers>
<remove name="PHP_via_FastCGI" />
<add name="PHP_via_FastCGI" path="*.php" verb="*" modules="FastCgiModule" scriptProcessor="D:\PHP\5.6\php-cgi.exe" resourceType="Either" />
</handlers>
<rewrite>
<rules>
<rule name="Categories Match" stopProcessing="true">
<match url="^category/([^/]*)/?$" />
<action type="Rewrite" url="categories.asp?cat={UrlEncode:{R:1}}" />
</rule>
<rule name="Product Match" stopProcessing="true">
<match url="^products/([^/]*)/?$" />
<action type="Rewrite" url="products.asp?cat={UrlEncode:{R:1}}" />
</rule>
<rule name="Manufacturer Match" stopProcessing="true">
<match url="^manufacturer/([^/]*)/?$" />
<action type="Rewrite" url="products.asp?man={UrlEncode:{R:1}}" />
</rule>
<rule name="Product Detail Page Match" stopProcessing="true">
<match url="^([^/]+)/?$" />
<conditions>
<add input="{URL}" pattern="\.asp" negate="true" />
<add input="{URL}" pattern="\.css" negate="true" />
</conditions>
<action type="Rewrite" url="proddetail.asp?prod={UrlEncode:{R:1}}" />
</rule>
</rules>
</rewrite>
</system.webServer>
</configuration>

Andy

Please feel free to review / rate our software

OK thanks - have that file updated. Getting back to the instructions at https://www.ecommercetemplates.com/seo/search-engine-friendly-urls-asp.asp
1) is it correct that the line to be added to products.asp and categories.asp should go above the opening <head> tag? Just above that the files have the following line <!-- #BeginTemplate "Templates/project.dwt" --> and both are in non-editable region. Should it go ahead of the #BeginTemplate comment?
2) should proddetail.asp also be edited to include this line? The lines added to web.config make mention of this file in addition to the other two

Thank you,
Steve