Smart Links for SEO is the ultimate solution for shortening the links on your website, providing the shortest possible links as well as maximum flexibility.

Smart Links for SEO takes a short url, such as http://www.store.com/thecode.html, and determines hierachically whether "thecode" refers to a category, product, or screen code. It then shows the correct page to the user, without any use of redirects (in other words, it returns a 200 status just like a regular URL does).

This module is also a life-saver for customers who had static pages on their Miva 4 site, but want to run dynamic pages on Miva 5. You can keep the same URLs and not lose ground in Google! In fact, that's why we developed this module.

The other great thing about this module is that it correctly returns a 404 Not Found HTTP header if the code in the URL doesn't reflect a valid and active category, product, or page code. That way, products that you've discontinued or categories that you've deleted will be removed from search engines, making way for valid pages. No more "Miva Merchant Fatal Error" pages all over your Google SERPs!

From the Documentation

The Smart Links for SEO™ module allows you to have the shortest possible links (URLs) to your product, category, and additional screens within Miva Merchant 5.

Out of the box, Miva Merchant URLs have the following formats:

The use of querystrings and multiple variables makes these default URLs less than optimal when optimizing a Miva Merchant site for search engines. It's useful to instead provide shorter URLs that remove the unneeded text from the URL. An added benefit is that the URLs become more memorable to customers and the store owner as well.

The other problem with default Miva Merchant URLs is that the same product page can be reached by multiple URLs. For example, supposed you have a product with the code "shirt", that is assigned to two categories, with the codes "clothing" and "mens", respectively. In this scenario, Miva Merchant generates three separate URLs to the "shirt" product page:

In the above example, the first URL is used in links to the "shirt" product from the "clothing" category. The second URL is used in links to the "shirt" product from the "mens" category. And the final URL is used in links to the "shirt" product from the search results and product list pages.

Although search engines, particularly Google, are getting smarter about determining that the same page is served by multiple URLs, it's still safer to insure that only a single URL is used to reach a given page.

Other short links modules have historically allowed store owners to shorten their URLs by using an indicator, a piece of text that tells Miva Merchant (or more accurately, the mod_rewrite rules that support URL rewriting) whether the URL points to a product or category page. Some examples are:

The problem is that the extra indicator text reduces both the density of any keywords in your URL (such as "clothing" and "shirt") by making the URL longer than necessary, as well as the relevance of the keywords, by pushing them further from the beginning of the URL. Many of these URL rewriting modules also include the category code in the URL, which still results in the problem of having multiple URLs that resolve to the same page.

Smart Links for SEO™ takes Miva Merchant URL rewriting to the ultimate conclusion, offering URLs completely void of indicators, and with only the necessary product, category, or screen codes in the URL. (The rewrite rules can be used to further customize the URLs when circumstances make it desirous to do so.) The final result is these short URLs: