URL shortning sitewide - seo

[theconsultant]

Hi, 

I'm working on a site for a client who has a bt eshop, at the moment i'm reorginising the layout and making sure the pages are easy to access to access for customers. I have been placing appropriate keywords in places and using the short url options in the content / category pages for each page. My problem is the urls , especially for SEO. The site sells amongst other things shoes, handbags, lingerie.

The direct link  ( which i want!) http://www.misslalas.co.uk/ ends up as

 http://www.misslalas.co.uk/epages/BT3345.sf  ( i don't want!)- this is also shown in my eshop under the marketing google registration option 

Also the direct link for http://www.misslalas.co.uk/lingerie/chocolate-box ends up as 

http://www.misslalas.co.uk/epages/BT3345.sf/en_GB/?ObjectPath=/Shops/BT3345/Categories/lingerie/choc...

The direct links work, but if a customer clicks on any links on the page they revert to the long url. the long urls are in the browser window and google seems to be indexing both ways

Doing a search of http://www.misslalas.co.uk/epages/BT3345.sf on google shows all index pages have the long urls

http://www.google.com/search?q=site:http://www.misslalas.co.uk/epages/BT3345.sf

Doing a search on google on http://www.misslalas.co.uk shows a combination of long urls and truncated direct links ( which i want!)

as viewed by http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site:http://www.misslalas.co.uk&aq=f&oq=&aqi=

How can i make a site wide change so all the pages remain truncated short links for consistency and seo?

[eShopTeam · Accepted solution]

Hi theconsultant,

The eShop uses so-called canonical tags. These tags are stored in the HEAD section of the HTML pages and are used to define the URL under which the current page should be listed in the search engine.

As it seems, Google visited the shop pages before the short URLs for the shop were created and therefore indexed the shop pages using the long URLs. After the short URLs were created, the shop pages were indexed again, this time using the short URLs for the listing. As you can see from the search results, currently they are mixed in the ranking: some of the short URL pages are at the top, some of them are below the long URL pages. Over the next days and weeks, this will change to being the short URLs at the top and the long URLs dropping out of the search results.

As soon as a customer is in the shop, the navigation will use the long URLs to continue. If for example a product recommendation is sent by a customer to another, the short URL will be used as well.

Sincerely,