Permalinks & SEO

A classifieds site lives or dies on search traffic: every listing is a page somebody might search for. Three admin screens decide whether search engines can use them.

Friendly URLs

Settings → Permalinks.

With friendly URLs off, a listing is index.php?page=item&id=1234. With them on it carries the title. Turn them on before the site is indexed — changing URL structure afterwards means redirects and lost rankings.

Every route has its own pattern: listings, categories, user pages, contact, feeds, and the account flows. The screen lists the keywords each pattern accepts, and every one is required — a blank field is rejected.

Leave the defaults unless you have a specific reason. The one worth thinking about is the listing pattern: including the category makes the URL self-describing, and means the URL changes if a listing is re-categorised.

Friendly URLs need web-server rewriting

On Apache, mod_rewrite must be enabled and AllowOverride All must apply so the shipped .htaccess is read. On nginx you need a try_files rule. If every link 404s after turning them on, this is why — see install troubleshooting.

Renaming a category changes its slug and therefore its browse URL. ShopClass keeps a slug history so old category URLs keep resolving.

The XML sitemap

Settings → Sitemap generates the sitemap search engines read.

Choose what goes in:

• Categories
• Categories with regions, and categories with cities
• Countries, regions and cities
• Pages

and set the frequency — Hourly, Daily or Monthly — plus last modified handling. Extra URLs can be added by hand.

Include what has content, exclude what does not. Categories-with-cities multiplies into a very large sitemap, and filling it with combinations that return no listings teaches search engines your site is mostly empty pages. Turn those on once you have the volume to justify them.

The sitemap is cached. Regenerate / clear cache rebuilds it after a big change, and cron can pre-generate it:

php oc-cli.php sitemap:warm

robots.txt

The same screen edits and saves robots.txt.

The default is fine for most sites. Two things worth adding: your sitemap URL, and a Disallow for search-result URLs — an infinite space of filter combinations that wastes crawl budget on pages you do not want ranking anyway.

Saved-search feeds

Every search has an RSS feed, and users can subscribe to one as an alert delivered by e-mail. Alerts are sent by cron on the schedule the user picked; without cron they never arrive.

Settings → Latest searches controls how many recent queries are stored. That log is worth reading: it tells you the words your visitors actually use, which is what your category names should match.

Practical SEO for a classifieds site

• Listing titles are your page titles. Encourage sellers to write real ones — the publish-form placeholder does more for your rankings than any setting here.
• Expired listings are a decision. Deleting them 404s pages that may still rank; keeping them all leaves visitors finding unavailable items. Most sites keep them visible and clearly marked as expired.
• Thin category pages hurt. A category with two listings competing against a site with two hundred will not win. Fewer, fuller categories rank better.
• Serve one canonical hostname. Pick example.com or www.example.com, set it consistently, and redirect the other. Both answering the same content splits your ranking signal.
• Make the site fast. Turn on object caching and put a proxy or CDN in front — see the caching contract.