SEO Friendly URLs

13 May 2011

As part of our recent focus on search engine optimisation (SEO) the URL structure of your shops have become squeaky clean and you now have more control over the URLs for your shop’s pages.

For example, the previous URL for a product was similar to:

Now it has changed to:

You are able to control your category, product and page URLs if you wish. For example, in the above URL, you can choose the ‘hats’ category URL and the ‘green-hat’ product URL yourself. You don't have to do this. We have just provided you with the option to override our automatically generated values if you wish.

If you don’t use your own domain, your base URL in Smallfish has also changed.

For example, if your base URL was:

It has now changed to:

You may be concerned as you read this about existing links to your site. For example, you might be worried about what will happen if someone arrives at one of your old URLs from a search engine, bookmark, external link or if you have it on your business card. We have put in permanent redirects (a 301 redirect for those that are interested in the technical mumbo-jumbo) in place for all of your old URLs so if one of your customers goes to an old one, they will automatically end up at the correct location.

Apart from the URLs simply looking much better which is the modern way of doing things, we have done this because it can help your search ranking in search engines such as Google. This is because search engines often use the URL to understand what the content is on a page. The product at the above URL is therefore more likely to feature higher in searches for green hats. It is important to note that we do not have control over the way search engines rank your pages so this is no guarantee, however having clean, informative URLs is known as a best practice that contributes positively to search rankings.