Would like to have an extra field on product pages for SEO linking purposes

[dlkeith]

Currently any links created in the product description field are "cloaked" and redirected through an internal link.  I understand why this is and am in complete agreement with the reason.  Unfortunately, a side effect is that it makes it difficult to implement a complete internal linking strategy because you can't (from an SEO standpoint) link from product pages in any way that allows you to fully funnel linking power.  An additional text field at the product level in which you could enter completely custom text and links that were not cloaked would alleviate this.

[Omar]

Where should the content output from those fields (the link) be added in the product page?

[dlkeith]

My personal preference would be to have an optional text field just below the product description field.

[Omar]

I understand where the field would be, but where in the output, the product page, would that link be added?

Instead of a separate field, you can just add those links inside product desription, as html code. It will blend lot better with the description and you can also add as many links as you want, not just one.

[dlkeith]

Agreed.  You can add links to the description field.  And for navigation purposes it works great.  But it's not so good for SEO since everything in the description field gets redirected through a cloaked link.  So let's say I want to push some linking power to a specific product by linking to it from 3 or 4 other product pages.  I can't really do it with links in the description field because instead of linking to "http://MySite.com/Product.html" the description field link ends up being "http://MySite.com/click.php?=LJHLUYlksdjfli8uy9llLKH".  The effect is that the page I want to boost doesn't recieve the linking power because of the cloaking.

I completely understand the reason for the cloaking and am in full agreement.  My wish would be to have an optional text field (as we do at the category level) that would allow us to enter custom text and create non-cloaked links.  With that setup giving us the ability to do some non-cloaked linking at the product level we can create sites with strong internal linking which funnels and pushes linking power through the site in a very controlled and deliberate way.  And it would allow us to add, remove and modify links as our needs changed.

With this addition I believe whole-heartedly that I can compete with any other e-commerce store building software on the SEO battlefield.  Without it, my personal opinion is that there is a hole in StoreStacker's SEO potential.

I'd be glad to hear your thoughts on this, Omar.

Thanks,
Doug

[Omar]

Sorry, for late reply, i must have missed that.

Are you sure about manual added links indescription of a product get cloaked? It should be only buy links that get cloaked, that go to affiliate link, not normal html links. Try to do that and show me an example, it may be some kind of bug, or you may try to do somehting different then i try to explain (can be my bad to, i am not such a good "teacher")