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Cube Cart (CC3) SEO Mod - Search Engine Friendly URLs, Custom URLs, Meta Tags, Robots.txt & PHP Session Killer

Search Engine Friendly URL with PHP session killer and Meta tags Mod

otherwise known as the SEO Mod!

Get ranked better with search engines!

License:

You may use this mod on your cube cart without purchasing a license if you leave the advertisement link on the footer intact. Removing the link will violate the license. If you wish for the link to be removed you must purchase a license. The license purchased is for cube cart(s) running on a SINGLE domain name.

NOTE!! This license for the mod is in NO WAY affiliated with cube cart or Devellion Ltd at all!!!

NOTE!! Please install the mod first to make sure it is working and you are happy with it BEFORE you decide to buy a license OR request installation with your SEO license. Licenses are NON refundable!!!

NOTE!! If you have previously bought a license and upgraded to a later version of the mod, you must get it reissued DO NOT reuse your old licensed file it will be buggy!!

Purchase a license

The SEO Mod License is US$10. To purchase a license for the mod, please go to the SEO purchase page.

Already bought a license? Reissue it.

Please visit the SEO license panel to get your SEO mod license reissued if you have lost it or are upgrading your store. If you get a “domain name not licensed” message and you have bought a license then contact me with the domain name. You must reissue your license for the correct version of the SEO mod you have installed in your store otherwise it may be buggy.

Require installation of the mod?

I am now available again for seo mod installations.

If you are having trouble installing the mod or require me to install the SEO mod, I can help. Please follow the steps to request installation of the mod.

  • Please first purchase a mod license from above. (required!)
  • Transfer US$25 to my paypal account rukshanf@optushome.com.au (please DO NOT use this to purchase a license, use the system above)
  • Contact me via email at rukshanf@optushome.com.au with the following details: FTP server details, Cubecart URL, Cubecart admin details. The information you provide will be handled professionally and in the strictest manner. Once the job is complete, the details will be discarded.

Where is the Mod?

Download the mods from here:

So What Does this Mod Do?

The whole purpose of this mod is to make your cube cart more search engine friendly. It is also a tool that webmasters can use to optimize their stores for their keywords so that they can achieve better rankings for their keywords.

I have heard many people saying they get good rankings for their title of their website. This is usually easily achieved as there will probably not be many website owners targeting those keywords. What is more useful is to instead target keywords which you expect your customers to find you by. Take for instance if you run a kitchen store called “eKitchen”. Chances are you will hit top rankings for the keywords “eKitchen”. But who will ever do a search for that in google? Only your previous visitors or people specifically looking for your website. You are rather better of targeting keywords such as “stainless steel sinks”, “kitchen carcases”… you get the idea. These are keywords that customers will most likely search for and if your website is up there in the rankings for these keywords, you just might get lucky and get a sale. But even having the visitor land on your store page is a bonus, they may find something that interests them and bookmark the page or remember your store for future purchases.

This mod will change the URLs in cube cart from http://www.domain.com/index.php?act=viewProd&productId=233 to a search engine friendly URL which contains your product name such as http://www.domain.com/sinks/stainless-steel-sinks/prod_34.html. Note the product name is embedded in the URL, this will increase your rankings for those keywords.

The mod will stop PHP sessions being generated if the user agent of the visitor is detected to be a search engine. What this means in a nutshell is that without this mod the search engines will see your URLs as http://www.domain.com/index.php?act=viewProd&productId=34&ccSID=9cfa6c580d7c93b1f4ca204d0. Not very nice is it? The long string after ccSID is what cubecart uses to manage its sessions. You don’t typically see it while browsing apart from the first page because in our browsers it is generally stored as a cookie. Search engines don’t use cookies and so every URL they spider within our stores gets this nasty looking string. What is worse is that this string changes each time the search engine spiders our website and so we can have many different URLs all pointing to the same page. It is not good as some search engines penalize websites for this as there are many addresses for the same page with content that is identical.

This mod includes a robots.txt file. This file lists URLs that search engines must not index. The kind of URLs we do not want indexed are those tell a friend pages. If you browse to the tell a friend pages in your store you will soon notice that the content of this page is identical and we have many of them, infact one tell a friend page per product. We can get penalized for this for the same reason as above, that is having many URLs pointing to the same page with content that is identical. This file also lists other pages we do not want indexed such as the registration pages.

The mod allows webmasters to customize each page in their store with meta title, keywords and descriptions. This makes it easier to optimize your pages for your keywords, boosting up your rankings. Even though there is talk that big search engines no longer use metas for ranking, there are still other search engines that do. Also the meta description is used by some search engines when presenting the search results and act as a summary for your page. Hence customizing this with some text is that will entice your customers to click on the link in the search results is important.

The other newest addition to this mod, is the ability to add your own custom targeted keywords to the URL of your products, sitedocs and categories. With all these features, this makes this mod a must have for your store!

This mod can be controlled fully from the administration panel of your cube cart. The SEO mod can be enabled/disabled and all its features controlled from the admin panel once the mod has been installed. This mod should work on most servers, if you cannot get it to work on your server, please request installation from me, see above for details.

If you have any comments or testimonials about this mod that you would like to share with other readers, please feel free to submit your comments. However, please send all installation problems and possible bugs to my email address at rukshanf@optushome.com.au.

Contact

Email all enquiries to rukshanf@optushome.com.au

This entry was posted on Monday, May 28th, 2007 at 7:00 am and is filed under Cube Cart Mods. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

29 Responses to “Cube Cart (CC3) SEO Mod - Search Engine Friendly URLs, Custom URLs, Meta Tags, Robots.txt & PHP Session Killer”

  1. SEO Mod 6.1 for Cube Cart 3.0.16 is now released. This should address all known issues with the SEO mod.

  2. Joseph Rukshan Fonseka on July 5th, 2007 at 6:19 pm

    SEO mod licensing system is down. You can still purchase licenses however you will not receive the file. You will have to reissue the license when the system is up again, hopefully within the next 48 hours. You can delay purchasing a license till then if you wish, I will post when it is up and running again. Those who have requested installation, please be patient as I try to rectify this issue.

  3. [...] There is an excellent and freely available SEO mod for Cubecart, you can find all versions and releases of it by visiting the Cubecart SEO Mod Homepage. The mod is also know as a SEF URL mod for Cubecart and various other derivatives. [...]

  4. Joseph Rukshan Fonseka on July 6th, 2007 at 4:11 am

    The licensing system is back up and running. You can now purchase seo mod licenses or get them reissued. They will be emailed out immediately.

  5. SEO mod for cubecart 3.0.17 has been released.

  6. hi rukiman,
    is there anyway your MOD can do
    http://www.site.com/categoryname/productname.html?
    http://www.site.com/categoryname.html?

    by the way i bought your mod ages ago!

  7. It will involve a bit of work and not worth the trouble for a few reasons:

    1) Most importantly, it will only work in the rewriterule configuration.
    2) There is a good change that a product might have the same name and be in the same category.
    3) It makes no difference to the search engines.
    4) It will slow the mod down as I would have to do a database search for the product name in that category to work out the product Id as cubecart deals with IDs.

    I agree it will look cleaner to the human eye, but with those points above the benefits gained does not outweigh the amount of work involved to support it.

  8. well explained, i’m happy with the current one.

  9. I have been trialling the SEO mod on a website and it was OK and working, then last week my hoster moved the site to a new server and now the seo mod produces 404 errors. Switch off the MOD in CC Admin and the site works as per defualt CC installation url’s.

    Obviously SEO mod requires something that is not on this new server.
    http://shadow.dotcolo.com/phpinfo.php will provide most config settings for the server.

    Any ideas?

  10. When will this mod support 3.0.18 maybe 6.3 ?

  11. Any chance of updating this to work with version 4 of cubecart? Cheers and thanks for the resources.

  12. I have also noticed in Google Webmaster Tools, that all my category pages are the same, is there a way to change this ? Right now my store is getting gigged because it has the same title and description. Google is showing I have 10 duplicate pages, is there anyway to stop this with your tool ?

  13. Hi!

    Quick question - is version 6.2 OK to use with 3.0.18?

    Thanks!

  14. The mod is now updated for Cube cart 3.0.18. Unfortunately as I did not have time to find a Mac equilavent of Beyond Compare I have not included a diff.html file in this version.

    There will not be a version of this mod for CC4 as this version of cube cart already has a SEO mod built in.

    Sean, make sure you still have the .htaccess file of the seo mod in place.

    Using this mod you can customize the keywords, descriptions and title of every page in Cube Cart.

  15. I am introducing a new marketing package for those who wish to take it up. I will post some information soon. The idea is for people to use the SEO mod to create backlinks/advertising of their pages for a monthly subscription fee of around US$55. This will be limited to about 10 URLs. If you are interested, please send me an email. If I get enough interest I will launch this service.

    Your link will be advertised in about 1/10 of each page in a CC3 store that is using an unlicensed version of the SEO mod. Your link will be added to the latest version of the SEO mod and hence only future installations of the unlicensed SEO mod will advertise your links. The link is advertised in the footer of the store. You will also be able to choose your own anchor text within the link to increase your rankings for your keywords.

  16. Hum.. I can’t seem to use 3.18 on version 6.3, I can download it but when I extract it, it’s extracting 0% on some files.. I can download and extract any other file.. Anyone else having this problem ?

  17. Anyone else having trouble extracting the zip file as it is working for me but I use a Mac. Can you try WinRAR if that helps? Otherwise I will have to find a PC to zip it up.

  18. Hi I’ve got this error “Fatal error: Cannot redeclare generatequerystr() in /home/homeware/public_html/includes/sef_urls.inc.php on line 5″ any suggestion?

  19. This is a fantastic mod! It is what everyone needs in my opinion who is running Cubecart version 3.

    Awesome work and thanks so much!

  20. I have just installed the SEO mod - Thanks!
    Working fine so far - and now I can point people directly to a specific page in the sitedocs easily…..very handy….

  21. no matter, got it to work….its a shame I cant get it to read http://www.site.com/category/

    I didnt want the .html or the cat_id to show…..my store will never have a duplicate category….

  22. This is a great mod, but make sure you install this SEO mod before you install other mods - or make sure you have all the other mod files ready to re-install, as this mod seems to stop most other mods from working.

    Installed this on a number of sites now, every time it stops other mods from working, real pain in the rear.

    Still - great mod so worth going to the trouble of re-installing other mods, not that much of a prob if you know about it in advance.

  23. Well done on building this popular mod Joseph.

    I wondered how you have gone about promoting your CubeCart mod? We have just released Magic Zoom for CubeCart. It’s a very popular module for other ecommerce stores, so it should be popular on CubeCart. Without a central place for developers to post their commercial CubeCart modules, how did you go about informing CubeCart users of your mod?

    Thanks,
    Magic Toolbox

  24. Is there anyway to have the url’s without shop.php

  25. Hey,

    Love the mod just come across one problem i have moved servers and now cannot get the mod to work is there a file i need to change?

    J!

  26. Will this work with CubeCart 3.0.20?

  27. Have you fixed this issue yet?

    http://fragged.org/cubecart-problems-no-shopping-bakset-and-login-functionality-for-some-users_782.html

  28. Hello,

    I have problem with pagination on categories.Link is:

    http://www.anyname.com/categorie-name/c_2.html?page=1 not

    http://www.anyname.com/shop.php/categorie-name/c_2.html?page=1

    It doesn’t work.

    Thank you

  29. @Elspeth, yes latest version of the SEO mod has msn and google removed from the robots.txt file.

    @Dim, try opening shop.php and comment out the line
    $_SERVER['PHP_SELF'] = preg_replace(”#shop\.php”.$glob['rootRel'].”#”, “”, $_SERVER['PHP_SELF']);

    @David, yes there is now a new version for cubecart 3.0.20.

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