What is cPath in the URL and do I need it?

[MountainMan]

Adding cPath is an option in Ultimate SEO URLS. Should I use it?

 

 

Thanks

[Thomas789]

No you shouldn't. The whole point of having search engine friendly URLs is to avoid any query strings in it if possible. The cPath is in this case encoded in the page name (the path to the URL) so you don't have to add it anymore.as a query string.

 

Thomas

[Jack_mcs]

@@MountainMan Assuming you are referring to Ultimate SEO V2.2d and not SEO 5, that option was added because some shop owners said they needed to have the category ID listed in the URL. I don't recall the reason why but it is in the support thread if you want to look it up. So if you need it, it won't jurt to use it and may help. But you don't need it for the url to work.

[♥joli1811]

No you shouldn't. The whole point of having search engine friendly URLs is to avoid any query strings in it if possible. The c is in this case encoded in the page name (the path to the URL) so you don't have to add it anymore.as a query string.

 

Thomas

 

Hi Thomas

Can you tell us a bit more would be interested to hear your opinion why the cPath should not be used as keyword/page etc ??

Simply I tend to use my cpaths pointing to my products so bit lost here what do you mean??

Regards

Joli

[Thomas789]

Hi Thomas

Can you tell us a bit more would be interested to hear your opinion why the cPath should not be used as keyword/page etc ??

Simply I tend to use my cpaths pointing to my products so bit lost here what do you mean??

Regards

Joli

 

I don't use Ultimate SEO myself (I wrote my own script for rewriting the URLs for catagories and products), so I am only vaguely familiar with it, but as far as I am aware there are several ways of adding the cPath. One of these is adding it as a query string, which is how I understood the question. This certainly doesn't make much sense as a) it is not search engine friendly, and the cPath is anyway readily available on all relevant pages in form of the variable $cPath (set in application_top.php).

 

There may be a point for adding the corresponding category names to the page URL (which is what you seem to be referring to) but for deeply nested categories this may become awkward to read and search engines might perceive it as keyword-stuffing.

 

Thomas