Seach Engine Friendly URL

[michael_s]

SEO Warning


This contribution allows all server errors(404 and others) to only return to the content of the homepage of your site and using the same url that the error happen on. In the sense of SEO this is very bad.

I have went into this contribution pretty deep and finally after days of trying to find a solution to it I have came a point where I know there isn't a solution.
Well, that is there isn't one for this contribution.
I just made a bad choice in assuming that the previous programmers knew better than to allow it to work this way.

What does this mean?
Well, I'll tell you...

Your index.php page will be used for every wrong url that is accessed by search engines
This wrong url is kept in the address bar and the content of index.php used
This means that you will have many many duplicate content pages.

This contribution takes a 404 return code and changes it into a 200 return code. Search engines will think that this no existent page is a good page.

A person could type anything they want to get your site and showing the front page

domain.com/porn
domain.com/porn.html
domain.com/anything_here/more_stuff


This contribution was a waste of my time to try to update and make work.
In the end is was very SEO unfriendly if a site owner has to deal with a duplicate content penalty.
A competitor could easily submit your site to directories with false title, description and place an obscene url with it that validates and have your site related to things that your site has nothing to do with.


I suggest you go with Ultimate SEO URLs at http://addons.oscommerce.com/info/2823
The download from member "FWR Media" works just fine with osCommerce 2.2RC2a.
It allows the errors that are supposed to happen naturally.
The developer made the scripting to work with the .htaccess file the way it should have been used.

More...

[ruggerdean]

is this spelled wrong? should this say "Search Engine"?