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SEO-Friendly URLs

Learn what are SEO-friendly URLs and why you may need them.

Olga Tereshina avatar
Written by Olga Tereshina
Updated over 2 years ago

Generally, there can be 2 types of URLs used by an online store - dynamic and human-readable URLs.

The first type is the URLs formed dynamically based on a query to the store's database. For example, a typical product page URL may look like the following: http://www.example.com/cart.php?target=product&product_id=31.

Dynamic URLs containing query strings pose a problem for SEO because they stop many search engines from indexing such pages. They are also difficult to read and remember for your store's human visitors.

Human-readable or "clean" URLs, as they are called in X-Cart, are SEO-friendly URLs that are used instead of dynamic ones. With clean URLs enabled, the above-cited page URL could look like http://www.example.com/cup-of-mojo-bluetooth-speaker.html or http://www.example.com/cup-of-mojo-speaker.html.

Your online store uses the human-readable URL format by default. Therefore, you have complete control of what the URL says to your customers. In addition, you can create a clean URL for any page in your store at any time simply by saving/updating the page with the "Autogenerate Clean URL" checkbox enabled.

If, however, you prefer to add or edit a previously added clean URL manually, you can do so by leaving the "Autogenerate Clean URL" option disabled and editing the contents of the "Clean URL" field directly.

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