Link: Yahoo Store and 301 redirects.
I made this post on Webmasterworld's supporters forum back in January, but with all the questions coming in about 301's and the new "forced" redirect happening, you need to know about this stuff.
I'll post another article in a bit about the SEO implications of using the 301 after I get some more feedback from my SEO friends, but the word on the street is that if Yahoo is going to 301 your store URLs, you might as well refresh them to the WWW version of your domain (IMHO). -- Rob
Howdy! Yahoo!
Stores can be a real pain with multiple URLs pointing at the same
content. I'm not one of those guys who understands all the technical /
fabric of the universe stuff, and you really don't have access to that
stuff in a Y!Store anyway.
I've been using YStore since 1997. My solution for consolidating all those pesky Yahoo! Store URLs has been the following:
301 all my Yahoo URLs to the www.mydomain.com using the Store Manager redirect
use relative path URLs for all my internal links (for example, href=info.html)
use the base href=http://www.yourdomain.com/ inside the head tags to make sure all internal links point to the "real" URL I want the search engines to follow. I
use an RTML trick to have the BASE code show only on the PUBLISHED
version of the site so the Store Editor still works. If you have the
BASE tag active inside the Store Editor, every link will kick you back
out to the published version of the store. Istvan Siposs of Ytimes
showed me a bit of RTML code that "knows" whether or not you're in the
Store Editor or on the published site.
Under Store Manager > Site Settings > Domains Set your Yahoo! Domain Redirect Settings to www.mydomain.com
The 301 redirect fixes Yahoo! URLS like:
store.yahoo.com/youraccountname
accountname.store.yahoo.com/
shopping.store.yahoo.com/youraccountname and
many other variants. The Y! 301 redirect also sends folks using your
internal store search or shopping cart back to a URL with your domain
in it which is pretty cool.
What the Y! 301 redirect doesn't fix is URLs like this which all point to the exact same page:
www.mydomain.com/myaccountname/index.html
www.mydomain.com/index.html
www.mydomain.com/
mydomain.com/myaccountname/index.html
mydomain.com/index.html
mydomain.com/ Those non-www and /myaccountname/
URLs can all get indexed and crawled, but if none of your internal
links point to them, search engine spiders get back on the right path
immediately. After three or four months the bad URLs are dropped from
the search engines results and a single page gets "credit" for all your
internal links.
I also eliminate any internal links to index.html like the home button or the Name-image and link those (on the published site) to www.mydomain.com/.
Rob
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I would like to know if the entry point value is available in an automated fashion. Where I would be able to check the value from within my checkout porocess.
With any particular language I would like to know how I could access this variable value during my store checkout process. Not from the down load of my orders.
Posted by: MGP | Monday, June 12, 2006 at 09:59 AM