Preventing the spidering of long-style links and the URI Management

[lesliekirk]

How do you block spiders from picking up the long-style links that are available when you redirect, for example, a Product to a Category. The URI Management redirect "works" perfectly BUT it also leaves behind a Product without short-style link. The link is still discoverable

[Brennan]

The Miva long links (merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Product_Code=test) are always available and used as a fallback in the case and product/category does not have a URI defined in URI management.

In most cases, if you never publicly used these long links anywhere they should never be getting indexed. In the case where you 301 redirect one link to another the URI for the product your redirecting "moves" over to the new product leaving the redirected product with no URIs. Since no URI exists it does fall back to the long link. In most cases this is going to be completely fine because the long link has never been indexed so there is nothing you need to do.

However, if that product is still active the product will still show up in search/category results with the long link which you don't want. To avoid this you'll want to also make the product inactive when you 301 redirect it.

If for some reason you do have the long link indexed in the search engines, you'll need to add a 301 redirect from the long style Miva link to the new product it is being redirected to. Currently you cannot do 301 redirects with URL parameters in URI management. These have to be done with the .htaccess file.

[lesliekirk]

The Miva long links (merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Product_Code=test) are always available and used as a fallback in the case and product/category does not have a URI defined in URI management.


However, if that product is still active the product will still show up in search/category results with the long link which you don't want. To avoid this you'll want to also make the product inactive when you 301 redirect it.

If for some reason you do have the long link indexed in the search engines, you'll need to add a 301 redirect from the long style Miva link to the new product it is being redirected to. Currently, you cannot do 301 redirects with URL parameters in URI management. These have to be done with the .htaccess file.

Well, this is not good because it's 4000 products that are being redirected to parent categories. The URI Management seemed like it was going to be THE perfect way to do this until I discovered long-style links in the sitemap. These products cannot be made inactive. The site is using an outside sitemap generator because it also creates a user-friendly sitemap. It's the user-friendly sitemap that showed me the issue at hand. Then I discovered those same links were in the SMAP (which I removed the link to the Page - note it would be awesome if Pages could be made inactive).

I'm going to ask the SEO company that is working with the store owner what sort of "collateral damage" might come from removing the externally generated HTML sitemap and then use the built-in Feeds to create a sitemap.

[Brennan]

Curious why these can't be made inactive if they are being 301 redirected to a category?

[lesliekirk]

Curious why these can't be made inactive if they are being 301 redirected to a category?

Because the site doesn't use product pages.