medisave Posted February 8, 2003 Share Posted February 8, 2003 Hello, I am running the latest contrib for google sid killer and the buttin contrib. I am also running search engine safe urls. The problem comes when a customer arrives at my site directly at a product. If the add to basket it will NOT show up and the basket remains empty. This behaviour continues until the user goes to a sub cat page or the default front page! Is there anything we can change in the code to stop this happening - I really wish to use search engine safe urls as other domains have done very well in G with them turned on! However the behaviour above is causing a great deal of phone calls to us and will become even more of a problem if I start paying for links in ad engines such as google ads, overture etc as these need to really link to the products directly!! An example would be here: http://www.medisave.net/product_info.php/p...products_id/479 Cheers, Graham Wright. www.medisave.net Graham Wright ________________ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ian Posted February 8, 2003 Share Posted February 8, 2003 Just tried your link, and the add to basket worked first time. Trust me, I'm an Accountant. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
medisave Posted February 8, 2003 Author Share Posted February 8, 2003 Thanks for trying that Ian, however I cant get it too add first time! Only by visiting sub cat, or front page will it then start adding to basket. I have just tried from 2 seperate machines 1 running IE6 and the other running Mozilla (both opened fresh) - both said shopping basket empty. Anyone else try this for me ? Cheers, Graham Wright ________________ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted February 8, 2003 Share Posted February 8, 2003 the first time I tried it I got the following: Your Shopping Cart is empty! If you are unable to add to the cart and this always shows empty - you may need to enable cookies on your browser. then I hit the back arrow and I tried again and it went into the cart. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
medisave Posted February 8, 2003 Author Share Posted February 8, 2003 Thanks for confirming that. Problem is that customers then start thinking that the "in cart button" just shows them whats "in the cart" They then start phoning or emailing and stating that we have a stupid website as we have forgotten to include add to basket buttons and only have a button to show whats currently in the cart. Well for ages I have been having conversations with users of our site who I thought must of been doing something wrong! - trying to talk them through buying something online without sounding patronising. But there have been too many phone calls...which led to me to start looking at the problem and I came up with the direct linking business. Graham Wright ________________ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted February 8, 2003 Share Posted February 8, 2003 I changed my button to say ADD TO CART for that same reason :) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dreamscape Posted February 8, 2003 Share Posted February 8, 2003 it is the search engine safe URLS that do it... going to http://www.medisave.net/product_info.php?p...products_id=479 for the 1st time and it works (add to cart)... no real reason to use search engine safe URLS anymore... search engines can handle ? marks in the URL just fine now... and with SID killer & buy now to forms installed, your site should be VERY friendly to the search bots. The only thing necessary for evil to flourish is for good men to do nothing - Edmund Burke Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
medisave Posted February 8, 2003 Author Share Posted February 8, 2003 Yes the ? is compatible with google, but the last few days I have been research and I do believe that although sites get indexed they are not indexed as well or down graded IMHO I have done a great deal of research on webmasters world amongst others lots of people there report that they immediately get better results by removing the ? - do a search for "dynamic URL" I have built 4 or 5 sites in the past 6 months all with no SIDs by using the ? I could only attain around 50 entries into google and some of them yes had a ? And remember although google can understand the ? - they must have a problem with other sites that do not remove the SID and the spider gets trapped in the site - not all webmasters who use PHP are goign to the lengths that we have with killing the SID! surely google or whoever is more cautious when spidering a site with ? - probably only the people in google know! However other shops I have done with search engine safe urls on have every single page now indexed without exception. So based on my own experience and that of others Im going to stick wth the Safe URLs - just looking for people to be able to add first time with them on - anyway we could start another thread on the merits of the ? :) Graham Wright ________________ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dreamscape Posted February 8, 2003 Share Posted February 8, 2003 I dunno... I know if you have SIDS (no sid killer), you will not get as many pages indexed for whatever reason... check out wizards and wars site though... he's got a SID killer in place and uses the normal URLS (?)... looks like google has spidered all of his pages/products (204 results): http://www.google.com/search?q=Wizards+sit...=UTF-8&filter=0 The only thing necessary for evil to flourish is for good men to do nothing - Edmund Burke Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
medisave Posted February 9, 2003 Author Share Posted February 9, 2003 Thanks for the link - thats very interesting. I will look once again at turning the safe URLs off. Maybe things have changed with google in the past few months! Or maybe as you say its all to do with the SID - maybe the penalise long urls ? I was also thinking that maybe its not the SID killer at all and ths behaviour just happens on a vanilla install when you turn safe urls on - anyone not got a sid killer who can check? Graham Wright ________________ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dreamscape Posted February 9, 2003 Share Posted February 9, 2003 the thing about not being able to add to the cart the 1st time with safe URLS on?? yes that has nothing to do with the SID killer... it is like that on a stock OSC install... probably because search engine safe URLs are not fully developed (I think development on them has ceased altogether). The only thing necessary for evil to flourish is for good men to do nothing - Edmund Burke Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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