SEO

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  • Hikashop Business
3 weeks 12 hours ago #369795

-- url of the page with the problem -- : beeswaxcandleshop.com/store.html
-- HikaShop version -- : 6.1.1
-- Joomla version -- : 5.4.1
-- PHP version -- : 8.2.29

Hello - I am having a big problem with SEO on my site - Our page rank is down to 1. I have been working with ahrefs.com and google analytics to improve things.

It looks like a lot of my issues come from my hikashop program (see attached image) I must have some settings wrong. Are there some guidelines or directions I can use to improve the site?

Some of the pages in the image are pointing to checkout pages that should have been automatically removed.

Some of my friends are urging me to abandon Joomla/hikashop and use something like SHOP.COM. (I really do not want to go that direction)

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2 weeks 6 days ago #369798

Hi,

I tried several of the URLs noted with the error 404 on your screenshot, and they don't return a 404.
For example, the URL:
beeswaxcandleshop.com/store/christmas-an...t/add-1/cid-502.html
It works just fine and redirects to the checkout with the product in the cart if I open it with my browser. If it were really returning a 404 error, you would get an error page when opening the URL with your browser.
So, either your website was down when the tool you're using looked at these URLs, or your web server is blocking that tool from accessing the URLs.
It could for example be some strong configuration of your htaccess which would block crawlers from accessing the website, leading to the pagerank being downgraded even though everything is fine on the website.
So, from what I can see, the problem is not with HikaShop or Joomla, but the way the server / website is setup.

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2 weeks 6 days ago #369805

Thanks for the response - regarding the link to the cart - that was from weeks ago - shouldnt that be gone by now.

Also - should I let the canononical link be empty in every product - I think I have some inconsistency.

Should I reset my htaccess page back to a joomla standard?

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2 weeks 6 days ago #369806

Hi,

These are indeed good questions.

1. Regarding the 404 URLs, if your screenshot is from weeks ago, then no wonder that it doesn't match with what I can see on your website. Unfortunately, I can't say much in that case. I would need a recent report on issues, to be able to say what to do.

2. Regarding the canonical URL, it's a double edge sword:
- if your products' details page can be accessed with different URLs, you want to enter the main URL of the product in there. That way, you'll be able to guarantee that this will be the URL used for the indexing of search engines. Also, if search engines find other URLs for the page, they won't penalize your website for it. So having a canonical URL for each product is what I would recommend for better SEO.
- Now, having a canonical URL for a product means that this will be the URL used. Suppose you enter the URL www.hikashop.com/extensions/hika-essential.html for the product "HikaShop Essential". Then, two years later, you decide to change the alias of the menu item "extensions" via the joomla menu manager to have instead "our-extensions". This is fine, but you need to also update the canonical URLs of your products. If you don't, the links to your products will generate 404 errors because there will still be "extensions" instead of "our-extensions" in the canonical URLs. This will downgrade your pagerank, so you want to avoid this situation from occurring. If you think you (or the webmaster of the website) will want to change the structure of the menu items, and can't (or will forget to) update the canonical URLs accordingly, then leaving the canonical URLs blank is better overall.

3. It depends what you have in it. I can't check what you have in it unless you provide a copy of its content, so at the moment I can't say. If it's a mess in there, then you might want to start from scratch with the default Joomla htaccess.
Ideally, I would recommend being as close to what Joomla has by default as possible. This will simplify maintenance in the long run and will prevent issues with SEO when things change around.
But some things can be nice to have in it. Like for example automatically redirecting from http to https.

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2 weeks 6 days ago #369810

Attached is my .htaccess file - I think there is a lot of old stuff in there from over the years - trying to improve things, but maybe causing more damage.

Also attached is a csv download fromahrefs.com from one of their 404

File Attachment:

File Name: htaccess-file.txt
File Size:12 KB

File Attachment:

File Name: beeswaxcan...9-03.csv
File Size:418 KB

File Attachment:

File Name: htaccess-file.txt
File Size:12 KB
error pages

There are over 700 pages that show some 404 error - many are from old checkout pages. - It is hard to understand some of the stuff from ahrefs.com - But these 786 issues are all on my hikashop pages - I Am thinking I have some setting wrong.

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Last edit: 2 weeks 6 days ago by bigfoot. Reason: more info

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2 weeks 2 days ago #369837

Hi,

The htaccess looks ok.

Regarding the CSV file, I tried many URLs listed in that CSV file and not once did I get a 404 error.
As far as I understand, what is in that CSV file is either outdated and flat out incorrect.

Now, I did find a problem on your website. It seems you have a caching issue on your pages.
The caching is too agressive which leads to the checkout pages being cached when they should not, which means that you can see the cart of someone else or another state of your cart when access the checkout based on the URL used.
This is a problem and this might be why the checkout pages get incorrectly indexed.
You should disable page caching on your website. Or at least configure it in a less agressive way.
This could be why you get SEO issues on your website as crawlers might see things which are old generated pages instead of the current version of pages which apply to them.

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2 weeks 2 days ago #369840

I turned off: System - JCH Optimize Page Cache

All other cache seems to be off - How can you tell if the site was caching too aggressively.

Thanks for your help.

I could not understand the csv file either - but most all of the files listed were old cart files that should not even have been visible - and were causing an SEO problem - so I hope this helps.

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2 weeks 1 day ago #369848

Hi,

How can you tell if the site was caching too aggressively.

For example, take the first URL in your CSV file:
https://www.beeswaxcandleshop.com/store/beeswax-decorative-animal-figurines/product/updatecart/add-1/cid-218.html
Suppose that you open it on a browser which you don't normally use to access your website, or in incognito mode.
This will add the product with the id 218 (you can see it at the end of the URL) to the cart and redirect you to the checkout at
https://www.beeswaxcandleshop.com/store/beeswax-decorative-animal-figurines/checkout.html
In the cart display on that page, you'll see the product with a quantity of "1" in the cart.
Now, if you open a new tab in the same browser window and access this same URL again, it will again add the same product to the cart and redirect you to the checkout.
So, on that new tab, you should now see the product in the cart with a quantity of "2".
If you still see a quantity of "1" in the cart, it likely means there is a page caching issue as you're actually see the page that was generated before, on the first try, instead of the new page content.
What you can then do is to add an extra parameter to the URL in the browser's address bar.
For example:
https://www.beeswaxcandleshop.com/store/beeswax-decorative-animal-figurines/checkout.html?myextraparameter
You can change myextraparameter by something else. Since the URL is different, the page caching mechanism will force the regeneration of the HTML and you should then see the proper quantity in the cart.
And if you then access again the URL of the checkout without the extra parameter, you'll see again the cached URL with the wrong quantity.

Now that you've turned off the cache on your website, I'm not able to reproduce the problem anymore. I properly see the correct quantity of the product in the cart whatever I do. So that's good.

most all of the files listed were old cart files that should not even have been visible

I'm not sure what you mean. If you want a product to not be visible anymore on the frontend, you need to unpublish it. This will result in its URL generating a 404 error on the frontend since the product is not there anymore. This is normal and what it should be.
The problem with SEO would be if the URL to a product page or an add to cart page would result in a 404 error even though the product should still be visible on the frontend. I couldn't find an example of this on your website.
The CSV you got seems completely unreliable. I will be hard to draw any conclusion from this.

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2 weeks 1 day ago #369850

Thank you for your help - I will wait and see what my next reports look like from ahref.com

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