SEO - URL duplicate dilemma

[wergeni]

Hi

This is a classic old problem...

I have two url’s to find my products
1) site.com/product/iPod
2) site.com/product-category/high-tech/iPod

Q - Is this still a valid problem 2008?

Secondly my developer don’t want to use “product name” (iPod), he want to use the id number. “- That's a big performance drain to do that sort of thing.”
Q - Kind of kill the idea huh or do I miss anything here?

Regards
hakan

[csn]

Not really sure what you are asking here but you could format the URL as productid-product-name-goes-here.htm

[affMonkey]

Originally Posted by wergeni Secondly my developer don’t want to use “product name” (iPod), he want to use the id number.....

I suggest if your developer WANTS paying, then he should be doing what YOU WANT and not what HE WANTS!

The seo benefits are enough that you should demand the urls contain “product-name” imho

[channel5]

as for the duplicate URL, just 301 redirect one to the other.

And your developer is talking arse and just trying to get out of doing the work (or more likely he doesn't know how to do it)

[tbp]

In regards to the duplicate content, then just add a noindex meta tag to one of them, or block it through robots.txt, so the search engines can only see one of the pages. You only need 1 to rank so its not a problem.

With regards to the product id, you are correct in that the name of the product in the URL is much better in terms of seo than just the ID number. It suggests your developer doesn't know how to do it!

It's actually very easy, and you can do it in a number of ways:

Tack on the product code to the end of the product name eg ipod_nano_2431, then with the code you can easily extract the product id.

Alternatively, you can use rules using Apache's mod_rewrite module to achieve the same thing.

[MrCatz]

Originally Posted by affMonkey I suggest if your developer WANTS paying, then he should be doing what YOU WANT and not what HE WANTS! The seo benefits are enough that you should demand the urls contain “product-name” imho

The seo benefits are enough that you should demand the urls contain “product-name” imho

Having a keyword in the URl is a plus factor in SEO.

However, the final say would still be on how you optimize that page.

[Barry]

It is more of a performance drain if you are using the name of the product to call the recordset rather than a unique id, but the way to get round it has been mentioned. Just have the url in the format 'priductid-productname.html' he can then extract the product id he needs to call the data and you get the friendly names in your urls for seo.

[affMonkey]

Originally Posted by MrCatz Having a keyword in the URl is a plus factor in SEO. However, the final say would still be on how you optimize that page.

agreed MrCatz