[Zen Cart] Linked products

[johnnymac123]

Sorry to bring up a topic that is so heavily covered, but I am sitll having problem understanding what the exact problem is. I understand having multiple URLs for one page is bad SEO practice. But inconsisent navigation is bad for the customer, which seems a high price given you could potentially make up the "bad seo points" in other areas and just live with pagerank hit you will/ have already been taking.

I think I may even have a slightly different problem to others so I shall explain:

The site is http://partyshop.co.nz/

When I go to BARGAIN BIN for example (this category is all linked products), magic SEO displays the correct link for the category (CPATH is correct). But as soon as I select a product in the BARGAIN BIN the CPATH changes to the path to the master category. The same thing happens with the next/previous product helper at the bottom of the page. This doesn't happen if I disable Magic SEO URL.

Is this a symptom of the issues other people have described

Is there anyway to change this behaviour? From reading the posts there seems to be a lot of mention that it is impossible to fix with Zen Carts current database structure. Could you elaborate on this slightly? It seems to me that Zen Cart does the multiple URL thing by default, so it must be Magic SEO URL changing that default behaviour, there for it must be disablable (oversimplified I know )

To be honest I have just noticed it in testing a new template, and has obviously been happening for a long time without any customers mentioning it, but it seems very weird to me that there is not an option to turn this "master category" behaviour off.

Could you also elaborate on what the master_catergory_links or whatever option it is in MSU_TWEAK.INI does?

Also every once in a while I let the .htaccess regenerate. Whenever this happens I lose all my custom rules and have to paste them in again. This becomes a real problem, because I have to chmod the file to 777, let it regenerate, download it, paste in my custom rules, upload the file (hoping no one else refreshes their page or else my changes get overwritten again). And then change the file back to 444...I must be doing this the dumb way, is there a better procedure?

Thanks for any help!

John.

[inveo]

You are just experiencing what was already discussed before (breadcrumb and no duplicate content are features which fight with yourself - breadcrumb can not work old way if no duplicate needs to work correctly).

There is a special thread about it: [Zen Cart] Multiple URLs to one product is not duplication?

Also every once in a while I let the .htaccess regenerate. Whenever this happens I lose all my custom rules and have to paste them in again. This becomes a real problem, because I have to chmod the file to 777, let it regenerate, download it, paste in my custom rules, upload the file (hoping no one else refreshes their page or else my changes get overwritten again). And then change the file back to 444...I must be doing this the dumb way, is there a better procedure?

There is - please see manual for all ways how you can protect your .htaccess file content.

[johnnymac123]

Thanks for the reply.

I understand this, but what I can't understand is why there isn't a way to turn this behaviour off. Some people have SEO as their #1 priority, others have functionality as their #1, I personally would rather take the SEO hit and not have my customers scratching their heads wondering what is going on.

Any chance of having an option to turn this on/off?

Thanks for the tip on the .htaccess much easier

Cheers, John.