Search engine optimized product URL's: new scheme

Product detail pages, the page with the most information about a single product and the all important "add to cart" button, now have a new URL scheme. This changes comes about as part of the release of a new tabbed product detail page template in the latest System Update.

Whereas before the URL included the name of the category in which the product appears (in human readable words) completed by the product's item # (or Stock Keeping Unit, SKU) and capped with a .html extension, now the product name appears in place of the item #. This somewhat subtle difference offers one more bit of search engine optimization to the URL's in your website catalog.

• An example of the URL: http://yourdomain.com/product_categories/[category ID]-category-name-subcategory-name/products/[product ID]-name-of-product

What may catch your eye is the presence of the category and product ID numbers. Their introduction to the URL provides a number of performance and maintenance benefits, internal to Total Blue System. For example, there ought be some faster page load times on large category pages with many product detail URL's. There is no real harm or gain by their presence in terms of search engine optimization.

• URL's can be shortened for your convenience, removing the SEO-friendly keywords, and function with just ID #'s. The format is: http://yourdomain.com/product_categories/[category ID]/products/[product ID]

One tangible external benefit from the presence of these ID numbers for site owners or visitors is the fact that this URL scheme eliminates the possibility of a "page not found" error being encountered when a product detail page URL is requested and the containing category or subcategories have been renamed (this did happen in certain isolated circumstances before). A second benefit is that this URL scheme with it's ID numbers is consistent with the REST Application Programming Interface architecture style that we've adopted for our API. Third-party developers working to integrate Total Blue System with internal or externally-hosted order management databases will find it easier to work with these URL's.

Important: the old style of product detail page URL's will continue to work indefinitely. We'll phase them out at a point in the future when we're certain to have minimized any possible disruption to search engines or click-throughs from old email marketing messages.

Comments

[Patrick Pitman]

As a follow-up to this post, here's the date that the old style of product URL's will be phased out: 6 months after the release of the new style of product URL's.

So the date of expiration for the old style of URL's will be March 17, 2008.