URI Mapping
- Former user (Deleted)
- Loyd James (Unlicensed)
- Perry Tew
- Hunter Schaeffer
This information is for the legacy Catalog that has been replaced by UltraCart StoreFronts as of May 2015.
This information remains for long time merchants who may still be using a legacy catalog. Please see the StoreFronts User Guide for current catalog technology.
Click here to jump to URI Mapping with your Storefront
Moving your website over to UltraCart and using the Catalog to power your entire online presence could mean you’re a genius, and as a genius you have a few significant decisions that need to be considered before you can just repoint your Domain Name Servers (DNS) and “go live”.
If you’ve been in business for some time, you’ll need to consider how the search engines have you indexed. Regardless of what the website pages were that you had before, as you move into the catalog system many of them will change as a result of UltraCart’s hierarchy in the Content Management System (hereafter CMS). It does this for a number of reasons, but the end result is that your urls will change. So while before you may have had an arbitrary website page that just had a single item here:
www.yourdomain.com/widget/randomproductname/werlkjoi254u[09]-v098-234ojlkj]-23j’4li32j[
when the page for that product renders in UltraCart’s CMS it becomes simply:
www.yourdomain.com/products/itemid/
While this is better in terms of SEO, the ability for indexes to scroll your site, and for users to understand what their address bar is while they’re moving through your site, if there are places online where that initial url is still shown, it will render 404 errors when you push your site live on UltraCart. A 404 error simply means that the indexes do not have that page and therefore it cannot be rendered for you. The continued use of this constitutes not only people not being able to get where they want to by clicking a link, but it also causes the search engines to dock you points.
In order to get around this happening UltraCart allows two areas for you to map your pages when you move over to UltraCart.
One is the URI Mapping area found in the Catalog area here:
http://docs.ultracart.com/display/ucdoc/Redirects+-+Catalog
The other is the redirect mapping that is done when you first change your site over. This would be in the form of a redirect shown here: