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Speaking addresses such as /schuhe/herren/laufschuh-alpha do not arise in the shop by chance. They follow a pattern that is stored in the TopRank Manager in the URL settings area: once for categories and once for products. In this pattern, the two tags on this page act as placeholders for the category path and the product name. Guide: SEO URLs
These two tags are not template tags. They work exclusively in the URL patterns of the TopRank Manager. They have no meaning in a shop template.

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The category path

SEO-Cat() takes exactly four parameters, separated by commas and in this order.
With the first two positions, you trim the category tree. In a deep product range, you rarely want the entire path in the address. The top levels provide the classification, the bottom levels the precision, and with two numbers you choose both independently of each other.
Anything that may appear in an address is allowed as a separator. A slash creates real path levels, a hyphen a flat address.
All four positions must be specified, even if you do not need one of them. If one is missing, the pattern is invalid and is not accepted.

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The product name

SEO-PR-Name has no parameters and stands for the name of the product.
A product pattern does not have to contain a category. ~SEO-PR-Name~ alone results in a flat address in which each product stands independently of its classification.

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When a pattern is valid

The TopRank Manager checks the entered pattern before accepting it. Three rules decide.
The last rule prevents a pattern that mentions a category but does not take over a single level of it. This would result in the same empty address for every category.

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What results from the patterns

Categories and products without names do not get a speaking address. The shop system notes this during generation and skips the entry.
If the product pattern contains a category part, a product that is in several categories also gets several addresses. The shop system keeps one of them as the main address, and the others refer to it. A product pattern without a category part, on the other hand, generates exactly one address per product. Which variant you choose therefore determines not only the appearance of the address but also the number of addresses in the shop.
You control the conversion of umlauts and special characters separately from these patterns via the character mapping of the TopRank Manager. A mapping that maps a character to itself is ignored.

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The tags at a glance

Both tags apply exclusively in the URL patterns of the TopRank Manager and in no shop template.
  • Guide: SEO URLs
  • Guide: SEO optimization with TopRank
  • Reference: E-PSEO_ (SEO fields)