Hi Bellcross,
Thanks for trying out PG Simple Affiliate Shop.
I have already been asked about making the ‘sasproduct’ part configurable on the options page and will do that in the next release which will come soon.
I don’t believe it’s a dupe content risk because the general shop page has all of your products on it and you do not have the option to target them individually for SEO using tools like WordPress SEO from Yoast. When they are shown as individual pages then you can target each product if you choose. I’m happy to make it a configuration option too so that you have the choice.
If you have anything definitive on the SEO issue then I’d love to know as I have seen people who want to use different keywords for the page that is a list of products and the page that is just one product.
To temporarily remove the title as a link change this line 541 in the php file called shop.php
<a href="'. get_permalink().'">' . get_the_title() .'</a>
to
" . get_the_title() .'
That should do it by just removing the link code on the heading.
Let me know if that works and any reference on SEO regarding shops that you might have so I can share if it’s helpful.
Best wishes,
Brian (People’s Geek)
Thanks for the prompt reply Brian.
It’s cool that those two configuration options are planned, I think I may remove the title link manually for now like you suggested so I’ll mark this as resolved for now.
While I see the SEO value of having each product as a separate page for a <H1> title and meta, I also see it as risky when my category pages will already have the full product descriptions. So when a user clicks through to individual products they will see no new content – it will be the same image, same full description/quote, and same title (though in H1) – those pages will hold no additional value to them.
So I don’t think that’s something Google would value either, and even if the dupe content is fine by Google it would still dilute the value of links I DO want to include on my category lists to other internal pages, and the power of the lists themselves.
I don’t have a definitive reference for this, it’s one of those annoying vague SEO issues after all, though I guess SEOmoz is as good as any:
http://www.seomoz.org/q/duplicate-content-from-category-pages
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/duplicate-content-in-a-post-panda-world
General consensus from reading around though is that categories with snippets of the descriptions = fine. Full descriptions on categories AND product pages = not so much.
But best to just leave it up to people with an option. (By the way, an option to make the product image the aff link would be cool too.)
Thanks
