What do the upgrade docs mean by 'Canonical URL Support' ?

[TheOne]

I recently upgraded from 1.3.8a (fully patched, ofc) and I saw the 1.3.9a announcement and I have put my eye at the line which says:
Canonical URL support added for product pages and product listings. See /includes/init_includes/init_canonical.php

I'd take a look at the init_canonical.php and I don't see nothing important more than the code.

What the Zen Cart Dev team mean by 'Canonical URL Support' ?

Which is the advantage?

Maybe I'm getting wrong, if so, tell me

[Website Rob]

This might help.

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-ad...onicalization/

[TheOne]

no! you get me wrong! Already understood what Canonical URL's mean (Thanks to God!) but I mean what the meaning of 'added support for canonical url's' ?

If I already get canonical URLs working, what the hell will do this improvement?

EDIT: mmkay I already get it. It's only meant for 'supporting' for example www versus non-WWW websites and so on.

If any moderator is around, this thread can be closed. (and marked as solved? :\)

[kuroi]

The blog link is misleading in this context, referring to the original use of the term canonical for web sites to do with the root domain.

However, the term now has a much wider usage and that's the one to which the Zen Cart update notes are referring.

From the same source ... this would be a better blog link to use as a starting point

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/canonical-link-tag/

The intended benefit of this approach (in general, not just Zen Cart) was in SEO. The search engines recognised that in dynamic apps there might be multiple paths to arrive at the same content, and that those paths might lead to different URLs.

So they gave web administrators a way to select on URL upon which to focus all the search engine link juice for that content (rather than dilute it over several).

Zen Cart supports this by serving canonical links that strip out that URL parameters that really don't need to pop up in search engine listings.

[fergusmacdonald]

Can anyone clarify what exactly the new functionality includes. The docs seems to specify only product info and product listing pages.

Are other pages included as well? What admin control of this functionality is there?

Essentially I'm interested to know if it will replace SSU and generate:

http://store.com/categoryname/productname

URLs so that my upgrade will be seemless (in terms of URLs changing).

Any info much appreciated.
Thanks.

[Kim]

Essentially I'm interested to know if it will replace SSU and generate:

No, it will not replace SSU.

[fergusmacdonald]

Hi Kim,

Thanks for the fast response. Is there anywhere where it's functionality is detailed in more depth?

[g1smd]

Where a product appears in multiple categories, it will have multiple URLs that return the same content: e.g.

http://www.example.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=40&products_id=577
http://www.example.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=45&products_id=577
http://www.example.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=45_65&products_id=577

Added to that, if the product is deleted from a category but the product still exists in other categories, URLs for those 'deleted' product pages still continue to work: e.g.

http://www.example.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=30&products_id=577
http://www.example.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=32&products_id=577

Additionally, links from "also bought" related products produce yet another working URL for the same content: e.g.

http://www.example.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=577

All of these different URLs compete with each other for ranking in the SERPs.

The best fix is for there to be only one URL that works, and requesting alternative URLs returns either a 404 error or a 301 redirect to the correct URL. Where the site scripting cannot cope with that, adding the rel="canonical" tag is a band-aid that can help searchengines to combine the backlinks and ranking for all of the alternative URLs for that product and assign them to the canonical URL. The canonical tag simply designates a particular URL as the canonical version for that content and mentions that URL on all of the alternative pages where the rel="canonical" tag appears.

When presented with multiple URLs for the same content, and where some of the alternative URLs have more parameters and other have less parameters, Google usually prefers to list the shortest URL in the SERPs. This is most apparent when comparing www.example.com/ and www.example.com/index.php for example, where the former URL is almost always the one to be listed in the SERPs.

I'll also note that most product pages within ZenCart where the URL has a cPath category ID included have a maximum of three or four internal backlinks: one from the category index page, one from the New Products list, and one each from the 'next and 'previous' product pages within the same category.

The product URL that does not include the cPath category ID can have a lot more internal backlinks than that: certainly six from the "also bought" related products, and maybe others from elsewhere. I believe that it is this URL, the one without cPath category ID included, that should be the designated canonical URL.

At present, I believe that the chosen canonical URL for a product page within Zencart is one that includes a cPath category ID (the "primary" category or somesuch), but I am absolutely sure that the canonical URL for a product should not include any reference to the cPath category ID, and I would like to suggest that change be made in a future version of ZenCart. I do believe that it will provide crawling and indexing advantages.

[fergusmacdonald]

Hi g1smd

Thanks for your comprehensive reply - it's much appreciated.