Cleaning Up Magento URLs

While Magento is an e-commerce platform that prides itself and excels in search-engine-friendly standards, there are several things that can be done in the configuration which can clean up the URLs of your site – something which needs doing a lot to get the most out of clean URLs. Below is a list of checks for you to make in the configuration before signing your site off:

Canonical URLs

As mentioned in a previous post, canonical URLs can make a big difference and it’s very easy to add canonical meta tags to your website. I would suggest making the following changes to your settings in System > Configuration > Catalog > Search Engine Optimizations

1. Change category and product suffix to .php – this will enable external php scripts to work on your pages.
2. Change the page title separator to a comma, this is something which Google prefers when scanning page titles for keywords.
3. Use canonical link meta tag for categories & products – set to Yes.

Web Server Rewrites

By default Magento inserts index.php into it’s URLs, particularly for the category and product pages where the inclusion of index.php is a threat to the quality of the URL that gets cached by Google. A very simple workaround for this problem is to enable Web Server Rewrites which can be done in the Magento admin section when you go to:

System > Configuration > Web > Use Server Rewrites > Yes

These two configuration changes only take literally a few seconds to do and can vastly help your store with its search engine optimisation, something which we take very seriously here at Ecommerce Website Design.

Adam Moss Author Page

• WP E-commerce
• .htaccess Rewrites for Magento Shops
• Magento as a CMS