6 replies to this topic

[rcmedia]

I have a question regarding Miva Merchant's self-generated product display pages:

1) There is a miva module available that re-writes the product page string/path/url to a search engine friendlier version, removing all ? and such.
This will obviously help to get all our products deep spidered but I'm also wondering if something else would help even more...

2) Re-building (gulp) every product page in plain html and bypassing the miva generated pages altogether. This way I would have way more control over text links etc. on the product pages and they could have custom title tags, meta, filenames etc.
stuff you can't really do in Miva even if you use Open UI.

Any thoughts on this?

[djonline]

Just purchase the "Search Friendly Links" module and you will not have to rewrite all pages in HTML, the SFL mod will rewrite all your URLs to directory style links instead of dynamic. You just need to ensure your host supports htaccess rewrite.

You can purchase SFL here:
www.copernicusllc.com/products/mivamods/

Julie

[juliesjewels]

Take a look at this post regarding my experience with SFL and Miva Merchant. Bottom line is, purchasing that module from Copernicus was the best thing I've done towards improving my SERP's in quite a while. The module works great and I've given an example there of how a typical Miva Merchant URL gets shortened down to www.mydomain.com/prod-123.htm.

Just make sure you're on an Apache server that lets you use Mod_Rewrite. It's really important that you use Mod_Rewrite to further tweak the SFL module. Converting those long, ugly Miva URL's down to static pages using the Mod_Rewrite has been a really smart move for me and I hope it works out for you too!

Julie

[juliesjewels]

This way I would have way more control over text links etc. on the product pages and they could have custom title tags, meta, filenames etc. stuff you can't really do in Miva even if you use Open UI.

Rcmedia,

I just noticed your comment about custom title tags, meta tags, and such. The same people who wrote the SFL (search friendly links) module wrote one that allows you to customize title tags and meta tags for EVERY product in the store as well as categories. The default version of the module puts the product name in the title tag, but you can put anything you want in the title tag and make it different for every single product if you want. That's a really cool module too.

As far as custom text links on a page goes, you can add extra fields in Miva and add text links there if you need to. From what I've seen with Miva mod's you can put text links in extra places on the product page just by using OUI.

I would hate to see you go to the trouble of re-building every product page because I think OUI and a few new modules will do everything you want it to do.

Just my

Julie

[djonline]

Julie (great name ), you have a terrific understanding of MIVA!

I did want to mention that with OUI alone, you can customize your meta tags, title tags, text links, and many more SE options at your fingertips. And once you get a good understanding of using OUI tokens, you can have your meta data dynamically created on the fly by entering tokens in the meta fields which pulls your description and/or keywords from the corresponding page.

I did want to mention there are two modules which will recreate your dynamic MIVA pages into HTML pages pretty effortlessly, which are called Stat Kat and Search Engine Killer, but I have always wondered about the duplicate content factor and if it would trigger any sort of penalty?

Needless to say, you should not have to manually recreate HTML pages and implementing directorty style links with MIVA is almost a no brainer if you use SFL.

rcmedia, you may want to check out the plethora of modules for MIVA at www.jmhonline.net/mivamerchantmodules/

Julie

[juliesjewels]

I did want to mention there are two modules which will recreate your dynamic MIVA pages into HTML pages pretty effortlessly, which are called Stat Kat and Search Engine Killer, but I have always wondered about the duplicate content factor and if it would trigger any sort of penalty?

Hi Julie,

I wonder if rcmedia will notice that we're two different Julie's. I hope he doesn't think I'm posting replies to myself all this time.

I'm not familiar with Stat Kat but I used SEK for about a year. The biggest problem was that it created an additional product page for every product. That was an additional 5,500 pages for my store. And, on top of that it did not do a good job of creating optimized pages. For instance, it could not create individual title tags for each page. It used the same title tag & meta tags for every one of the product pages. So I ended up with an extra 5,500 pages which were not optimized well at all.

What I've done now is delete all of those SEK pages, implemented SFL, the custom meta tag module and the Copernicus store map module, then added extra code to my .htacess file (using Mod_rewrite) to re-write the SFL URL's from "www.mydomain/page/store_code/Category/product" down to www.mydomain/prod-xyz.html. Now my store will allow both versions of the link.

In order to prevent the SE's from indexing the same page twice (with the two different URL's) I have used my robots.txt file to tell the spiders to exclude the longer version of the SFL URL's allowing them to pick up the www.mydomain.com/prod-xyz.html page and not index the same page twice.

It's working so far for me. I can't complain, but I do wish I knew more about OUI tokens. There's only 24 hours in a day, however.

I totally agree with you; Rcmedia can easily get all of his pages indexed with just a few changes.

Take care!

Julie

[rcmedia]

First of all... thank you all so much for the quick, detailed answers.
That is incredible to say the least!

We have already purchased the SFL and store map mods for miva... but haven't implemented them yet until we did more research into the benefits of re-building everything via html.
I will tell my client to purchase the title tag mod as well first thing in the morning.

Julie's comments about combining the 3 modules seems to make sense and is worth a try because I'm getting pretty burnt out from very long days working on this huge site for several months now and any alternative to re-building well voer 1,000 product pages into html is sounding pretty good to me right now!

Thanks again for all of your excellent and timely answers.