How get rid of duplicate content, titles, etc on php cartweaver site?

[wojkwasi]

I'm not familiar with Cartweaver but these are just guides..

First define an organised URL structure - on bartramgallery.com, at a quick glance, a good one could be:

• bartramgallery.com/photographer (e.g. bartramgallery.com/gordon-michael)

• bartramgallery.com/photographer/photo (e.g. bartramgallery.com/gordon-michael/juniper-study-joshua-tree)

  OR
  bartramgallery.com/landscape-photography/photo (e.g. bartramgallery.com/landscape-photography/juniper-study-joshua-tree)

Keep in mind that the shorter URLs the better (could even have bartramgallery.com/photography/juniper-study-joshua-tree)

Second, rewrite the URLs using Rewrite Rules in the htaccess file (see this post: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/rewriterule-split-personality-explained)

I did a search on the Cartweaver support forums and found this:
http://forums.cartweaver.com/topic/google-analytics-identifying-products-and-categories

Oli, from the Cartweaver Support Team, seems to suggest the same "untested" approach as above

Let me know if you need any further help

[WSOT]

Thank you Woj for taking the time to look at my site and I like that organization method.  I was not aware of the possibility of being able to reorganize my site like that.  I will definately have to research and study a bit to be able to approach this and for awhile I will probably lose traffic but in the end after the changes it should be a much better foot going forward.

[wojkwasi]

My pleasure If you set up redirects, you shouldn't loose any traffic

This can also be controlled via htaccess

In google, search for this "site:bartramgallery.com" (without the double quotes) & you will see all the pages you need to redirect

I see the Charles Cramer page as the first photographers page that comes up & the redirect would be something as simple as:

Redirect 301 /results.php?category=10       http://www.bartramgallery.com/charles-cramer

[TheARKlady]

Great answer Woj!

[wojkwasi]

Thanks

[WSOT]

when I read it it seems that the .htaccess was the way to go in that you can have the links appear to google as the old links but in presentation to the customer and keywords the new url would be used.  The only thing I was confused about was that it seemed that it would not be good to do redirects but rewrites rather... or is it saying to do both?

[wojkwasi]

There are 2 issues here:

1. Need to fix the URLs for better user experience & search engines and can do so by using rewrite rules in htaccess

   The one suggested by the support forum (I've modified to better match your site but it's untested):

   RewriteEngine on
   RewriteRule ^photographer/([a-zA-Z0-9_-]+)/([0-9]+).php$ results.php?category=$2 The URLs would then be:
   http://www.bartramgallery.com/photographer/charles-cramer/10.php (not ideal with "/10.php" at the end but may be best given the limitations of the cart)
   rewrites to: http://www.bartramgallery.com/results.php?category=10

2. Clean up the Google index (remove old URLs & add new ones)
   Since both URLs will render the same content we can fix by adding a
   tag - attributing 1 source to the duplicate content - check if you can do this dynamically in the templates but be very careful not to canonical everything to the homepage or all your pages will be wiped out the index except the home page!)

[WSOT]

Yes it appears that this is a pretty good task to clean up this url issue but well worth it.  I was surprised by the system moderators of Cartweaver discounting the url as if it were not important because they are very good developers however I think that the url is much more important than some realize as they are both keyword rich and more interesting to the customer.  I am even less likely to click on some random url that has no meaning then if I saw one that clearly spelled out what the page was about..  Thanks Woj I am humbled and realize I have some studying to do.

[wojkwasi]

No worries Look forward to seeing the site with the new URLs in place - a lot of great photos on that site that need to be shared with everyone

[WSOT]

I tried the test example you did above and it was pretty cool.  With the web address http://www.bartramgallery.com/photographer/charles-cramer/10.php it rendered a page with I believe everything except for design and styles as well as any imagery.  Not sure what causes that to occur perhaps it is missing something but that was a pretty quick stab at fixing my url issue.  I am too tired now and need to go to bed haha.  Thanks

[wojkwasi]

I'm guessing the paths used to reference the images & css files are relative to the the results.php file.. now that there are "/"s the best thing to do is to change the template to either hard code an absolute path or use forward slash at the start to always start at the root.. eg

Old code:

New code

or

[WSOT]

Yes I am going to take a look at that when I get home perhaps I have to change how a few things are referenced as well as create the change of address right?  because if you type in the normal dynamic nasty url it still goes to the nasty url but if I select the url and paste it.. it brings up the page as I mentioned above.  Basically stripped of images and styling.

I am wondering if it is possible to include that number at the end as it is the actual image and could potentially populate the title of the image at the end which would be sweet.  Of course then I would have a new problem of too long of an url as I have the titles pretty keyword rich on a lot of them to make a proper title for the page.

If this all works out I have to create a link to your site at cartweaver and from a couple of my sites as you have been a great help and from what I can tell have been able to properly diagnose a fairly complex issue with php and cartweaver and even if some web page that I have not seen something similar enough you have been a great help.  Thank you

[WSOT]

I am still researching a bunch of sites trying to figure out a way to get the product ID name at the end which would be great as that is the page title.  I just thought I would mention that I am working on it and see if you thought that it was not possible as you mentioned due to Cartweaver's limitations.  It's funny that I have spent so much time trying to get my urls to show up how they should... seems this could have been configured into the original product.  Beggars can't be choosers.