a disadvantage for OS Commerce

[wannabe_guru]

you all seem to be forgetting about search engine optimization. I have looked at OS commerce stores and the lack of being able to generate HTML pages from the cart (the only exception being the .index page which can have buttons that lead to the rest of the cart) is a definite downside.

LiteCommerce seems to fix this.... any differing opinions?

[Hierophant]

So you are relying on the myth that search engines can't index dynamic pages?

[wannabe_guru]

So you are relying on the myth that search engines can't index dynamic pages?

They can but I don't see too many OS shops ranked high in yahoo or google. I usually look at cold hard facts and it seems that it isn't a myth...search engines look at html text and content over dynamic content.

[Hierophant]

They can but I don't see too many OS shops ranked high in yahoo or google. I usually look at cold hard facts and it seems that it isn't a myth...search engines look at html text and content over dynamic content.

There aren't too many OSCommerce shops in Yahoo or Google because most of the people that own them are hobbyists with no real conception of doing business on the Internet. You can see this just by visiting the OSCommerce support forums.

What keywords are you searching for?

[wannabe_guru]

There aren't too many OSCommerce shops in Yahoo or Google because most of the people that own them are hobbyists with no real conception of doing business on the Internet. You can see this just by visiting the OSCommerce support forums.

What keywords are you searching for?

lol...well, i found one that is indexed... look up hubble science cards. I just know it's a lot harder because I work with Miva Merchant and have worked with OS Commerce in the past, and if you don't set up html mirror pages for the script, you don't get good rankings. You're right in the sense that if no one knows what they're doing, the site won't get indexed regardless of script or html. Each page should have wording, etc. to target for keywords....

[aspen]

http://www.cbswords.com

I've had to edit OScommerce to get to where I am but I've got good rankings.(example)

My edits include:

1. Breadcrumb edits to link to the homepage differently.

2. Editing the menu to link to the most popular products on every page.

3. Editing the database/category display pages to include a paragraph of text at the top of each category.

4. Installed a hack to allow for unique title tags for each category and product.

5. Turned on SE friendly URLs.

6. Installed a hack to remove session ids for spiders.

I probably did some other things I'm not remembering too.

SEO is very very very important, but having static HTML pages is not important for SEO.

[sadcox66]

They can but I don't see too many OS shops ranked high in yahoo or google. I usually look at cold hard facts and it seems that it isn't a myth...search engines look at html text and content over dynamic content.

Thats not true, here is a phrase that is relatively competitive.

Google

Yahoo

Please note in the above example that pure html pages are ranking below that of osCommerce.

And I have done SEO for many of my clients who are in the top 10 SERP for competitive phrases all using osCommerce loaded, so this has been proven time and again that osCommerce can rank high and is not treated any different from other HTML pages.