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SEO friendly URLs not working (including 404 - page not found)
Question
1. I see the links in the category menu formatted as friendly URLs, but when I click them I get a 404 'page not found' error.
2. I have setup the SEO friendly URLs and set my custom 404 correctly, however I noticed that items from the 'front specials' and elsewhere still use the unfriendly parametrized URLs, and the Google Sitemap also does not produce friendly links. What's going on?
Answer
1. SEO friendly URLs are activated if you set the fakelinks config setting on (which is the default and will take effect if you install the 'pro' version). But you must also set the custom 404 page for the site to point to the 404.asp file on the root of your site. Most web hosts will either have a panel to let you do this to a site on shared hosting, or their tech support can set it up for you. To do it directly in IIS (if you have your own server), go to the site properties and then 'custom errors'. Scroll down to 404 and edit that entry. Set it to be type 'URL' and the value "/404.asp", then save the changes. If your store runs in a subfolder, e.g. "shop/", then this should be reflected in the path to the 404 you enter, e.g. "/shop/404.asp".
See the PDF manual for more information. If you cannot do this quickly, use the fakelinks config setting to turn the friendly URLs off until you can get the custom 404 set up.
2. The design of this feature is intended to give Google and other search engines at least one 'friendly' path to each category and product. It is *not* intended to completely remove parametrized URLs from every aspect of the store and replace them with friendly looking ones.
Think of it like this; instead of only unfriendly paths to products and categories, there are now both friendly and unfriendly ones. Google and other search engines can follow whichever ones they want.
If you believe that having the same page accessible by parametrized and friendly URLs will penalize you in Google because of it being considered as duplicate content (we've seen no evidence of this), then you can block indexing of the non-friendly pages with a robots.txt file
Disallow: /product.asp
Disallow: /prodtype.asp
Regarding Google Sitemaps, this is intended to tell Google where pages are so that it does not need to spider the site, following links from page to page to index the site. Since the SEO friendly URLs aim is to improve spidering, the parametrized URLs should not prevent Google indexing pages.
In short, the functionality is designed to allow Google and other search engines to index more completely and more quickly, not to remove parametrization from the store entirely.