Geek School: Canonical URLs and InterSpire Shoppingcart

We know you are all too excited to contain yourselves.

Google is punishing you for your duplicate subcategories in Interspire Shoppingcart and you have tried the canonical URL mod, but it doesnt help.

So without further ado – here's a hack that lets you define a canonical URL manually for each category page.

It requires a bit of editing php, and some careful data input, but its very straightforward.

Open \lib\templates\template.php and navigate down to row 386 (in version 5.06 anyway) where it says

$tplData = str_replace("%%Page.MetaKeywords%%", isc_html_escape($this->_GetMetaKeywords()), $tplData);

and remove the call to isc_html_escape so you get

$tplData = str_replace("%%Page.MetaKeywords%%", $this->_GetMetaKeywords(), $tplData);

Save the changes.
Take a break.
Half your hacking work is done.

Now log into the admin pages.
If you click on the "Products" tab and choose "Product Categories" you can edit the "META Keywords" field under "Search Engine Optimization".

We will use that field to hack in a canonical meta field.

Enter

"><link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/canonical_category" />