dashCommerce

Are there any known issue with spiders crawling DashCommerce 2.2?  I've noticed that my dynamic pages with the GUID URLs don't seem to be getting indexed any Google or Yahoo.  A couple of them show up in MSN.  Also, do you have any recommendations as far as a tool that I can run against my live site to check for potential spider traps?

I am running 2.2 as well and have had a lot of trouble with the dynamic URLs.  I have added a static html link sitemap temporarily while I replace the menuing system as well as implementing the SEO suggestions in this post, http://dashcommerce.org/forums/t/408.aspx, specifically nwscrubs1's suggestions.  My site is amishlegacies.com, hopefully I get the updates done soon and be able to post what worked and what didn't.

I should add a new discovery that on the catalog pages, my hidden "Viewstate" attribute was extremely large and placed above the actual page content.  I believe this could reduce the ability of spiders to crawl the page if you have a lot of products on that page.

 I found various solutions for this, and chose to store the viewstate in a session variable for the catalog.aspx page only.  On the product page, and a few others I had the viewstate moved to below the page content.  Both were done by extending the page base class.  If someone needs some code, let me know.

Good find!  I would love to see how you did that.

My site (DashCommerce 2.2) finally got indexed by Google which was awesome but I still haven't gotten indexed by Yahoo Slurp.  I just recently added the App_Browser file shown here http://todotnet.com/archive/0001/01/01/7472.aspx in hopes that that would make a difference and it hasn't yet but it's only been about a week since the change.  Just curious if anyone else had any similar experience with this.

I was able to add individual category page Title, Description and Keyword tags to each category page using the following code. The category name becomes the page title, short descrition the page description and the long description (I have amended the CMS to use this for keywords) gives the keywords.

         this.Title = category.CategoryName; 

        HtmlMeta hm1 = new HtmlMeta();
        HtmlHead head = (HtmlHead)Page.Header;
        hm1.Name = "Description";
        hm1.Content = category.ShortDescription;
        head.Controls.Add(hm1);
       
        HtmlMeta hm2 = new HtmlMeta();
        hm2.Name = "Keywords";
        hm2.Content = category.LongDescription;
        head.Controls.Add(hm2);

How can I amend my category page to load by category instead of guid?

On the product page I would like to use the product title for the url.

Can anyone help me to implement this please? I am currently learning ASP.NET so as much detail as possible would be much appreciated.

Hi Brian,

I just want to offer you a word of caution on doing this for 2.2 - you need to find a way to discriminate between categories that may have the same name. We ran into this with 2.0 right before the release, so while you may be able to get the url rewritten, what you want to avoid is something too general that will eventually cause you problems. In our case we had someone who had Men and Women as top categories and then Shirts under each of those. Shirts is too general - so you need to carry something else around to tell you which shirts.

Just a heads up and I hope it helps. 

Hi,

With some work in DC 2.2 you can use the Intelligencia.UrlRewriter that's very easy to setup and configure to suit your needs. However Chris is right and you want to ensure that you get the right naming convention for your page.

Aim for something along the line category / product ID then category / product name so you end up with something like:

http://www.myshop.com/22/Mens-Shirts/ or similar - Intelligencia.UrlRewriter does this very well. And adding the ID along with the name should resolve any duplicate issues.

You can use Regex or knock up procedure that can replace anything in the items names that you need to escape for the web - replacing spaces with "-" etc.

Regards,

Steve

Ok so it turns out this was fairly easy to do after all.  I also eliminated the "category" and "product" sub-folders also which seemed to help with some spidering issues.