SE-friendly urls for an e-commerce site

hey all,

what do you think of the following ecommerce site selling widgets? mod_rewrite will be used to process the requests.


1) product detail display page:

example.com/cat/Widgets/Blue-Widget-Limited-Edition/100

Code (markup):

where
cat = short for category
Widgets = product category name. no need for the cat id to be there since the name can be enforced to be unique. there are only 10 categories.
Blue-Widget-Limited-Edition = product title truncated at 32 chars or so
100 = product id so that the item can be looked up and displayed. the reason it's at the end of the url is because (from what i understand) the most important stuff (i.e. product title) should be as close to the domain as possible.

2) category page: (displays items within the category):

example.com/cat/Widgets

Code (markup):

see above if you need this explained

3) product search:

example.com/search/color/blue

Code (markup):

or

example.com/search/manufacturer/Widget-Maker

Code (markup):

where the word after the "search" is the search type and the word(s) that follow is the actual value to use as a search criteria

any comments?

thanks a lot,
James

 

Should help your widgets get some search engine love

 

thanks. that's the goal

p.s. i wish these were my widgets. this project is for my employer

 

I started just with the

to say DONT DO THAT ..... make sure the title is complete...and then I read on and you say

....goodness..... you already know it...... do not vary away from what you are saying ... you have to be precise and word perfect with G at the moment

 

Cool. so is there a query string size limit that G, Y or MSN impose? in other words, if i leave the full title in the url and it happens to be 20-30 or more words long, will the page get indexed?

 

also, say i sell dvds and would like to include the word "dvd" somewhere in the url... i also know that a search such as "action dvd" would be common. does the word "dvd" have to appear shortly after the word "Action" on the url or it does not matter that much? could it be before and have the same effect? is a slash between two words OK or should i work towards having the exact "Action-dvd" in the url?

 

I can't say without a doubt, but I think 128 characters is the upper limit.

 

Your titles have 30 words? That sounds more like a description to me.

 

true. it won't be common at all. in fact, to save processing time when building the urls, we might just skip the truncation altogether. if some products will not get indexed as a result of this, oh well. those will be rare cases.

mopacfan, thanks for your help.

so any input here? http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showpost.php?p=241656&postcount=6

 

Another related question for you guys:

i am planning to replace all spaces in the product title with dashes. are there any other characters that either need to be replaced with dashes or discarded?

any advice is greatly appreciated
james

 

I would remove everything except letters and numbers.