I have just been setting up an ecommerce site with hostmysite and discovered that the url resolves to www.m3jewelry.com/merchant2/ rather than www.m3jewelry.com. I finished speaking with tech support and they told me that there is no way to have MYURL.com (without redirects) and have MIVA as they are on two different servers.

Has anyone had any problems with search engines because of this?
How have people handled the SEO implications of this redirect?
Does using a .htaccess file handle this problem?
Or is keeping them separate (aka store.MYURL.com...) work better?

M3Jewelr

There are several options depending on what version of Miva Merchant you are using...first, a bit of debunking:

Google has no real problem indexing pages with dynamic urls (i.e., /Merchant2/merchant.mvc?screen=PROD&Product_code=Blah).

However, other search engines may...and shorter, more relative urls (mysite.com/products/blah.html) tend to "rank" better than the dynamic urls.

No the solutions:

For Merchant4 you can get what is generically called search friendly link modules that change the appearance of the link to something like yoursite.com/page/blah/

For Merchant5 you can do this yourself within the Merchant admin

Both require the use of a .htaccess file with mod rewrite.

You can also use a product such as our Merchant Optimizer which creates shorter urls by the virtue of actually producing static pages of your dynamic merchant pages. The upside to this is that your site will run MUCH MUCH faster, and SE tend to like static html files better (which honestly, doesn't make sense to me...but ancidotal evidence says otherwise.)

Hi

They should be able to update it to have just yourdomain.com instead of store.yourdomain. They do reside on different physical servers, so you wouldn't be able to access your regular website. I suppose you could use a subdomain on the regular website if you needed it though. To point yourdomain.com to the store, they would just update the DNS to the Miva server, edit the config to recognize the request from yourdomain.com and then of course inside the Miva admin update the site configuration with the right links.

I haven't really seen anyone use an htaccess to rewrite the Miva URLs so I'm not sure how well that would work for SEO.

.htaccess rewrite rules are used all the time with Merchant...and have absolutetly no negative effect on Search Engines (if done correctly).

A search engine cannot tell the difference between content it finds when looking at the url

www.somesite.com/page.html

whether that page actually exists there, or is a redirect for www.somesite.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Product_code=page

You should be fine using an .htaccess redirect but leaving as is should have no effect on rankings. Static pages do not rank better than dynamic pages just because they are static. There is some truth that having your miva pages "appear" static will help get them indexed faster.

jason