Maintenance tasks for Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Set link names

Ideally, all products, product categories, product category groups, and product manufacturers should have link names set.  This is helpful for SEO because your site map will include links like mygunstore.com/product/glock-19-gen-3 instead of mygunstore.com/product-details?product_id=100.  Link names are more informative, less likely to be flagged as duplicate content, and less likely to earn you a scolding from your SEO specialist.

Link names can be set in bulk in Products Maintenance, Product Manufacturer Maintenance, Product Category Maintenance, and Product Category Group Maintenance.  The process is the same for all of 4 pages, so only Products will be show below.

1. In Products > Products, click the Filters button and check the box for the filter "No Link Name Set"

2. From the Actions menu, click "Unselect all" to make sure no records are selected.  Then click "Select All" to select the records with no link name.  Then click "Set Link Name to Description for Selected Products".

3. Check the reply message to make sure that the link name was successfully set for all records.  The link name is required to be unique, so if there are duplicate descriptions, setting the link name may fail for some records.

Set unused Product Manufacturers as inactive

Every product manufacturer record in coreFORCE has its own page in the sitemap, regardless of whether you sell any products from that manufacturer.  This will lead Google to identify a number of "Soft 404" errors, meaning that although the page exists, it will have no useful content and/or a message like "No results found".  Pages like this have a negative impact on SEO, so it is better to remove them from your site.  To do this, set the manufacturer records as inactive.  

1. In Products > Taxonomy > Manufacturers, click the Filters button and check the box for "No Active Products."  Click Save to filter the list.

2. From the Actions menu, click "Unselect all" to make sure no records are selected.  Then click "Select All" to select the records with no active products.  Then click "Mark selected Manufacturers inactive".