Estimated reading time: 4 minutes
In our blog post A Video Guide to URI Management in Miva, we explain the basics of what a URI is and how you can manage your settings in the Miva admin. We even have a video tutorial to show you the ropes of Miva’s URI Management tool. However you may still be running into an issue.
Miva’s URI system has one very specific draw-back: it will not generate URIs for inactive products. That means you won’t get properly formatted URIs for you if you do any of the following:
- Create the product as “inactive” while you add details, then make it active when you’re done setting it up.
- Import product uploads from .csv or flat files.
- Re-activate old products that didn’t originally have URIs (ie. from an old version of Miva).
Why Are Structured URIs Important?
Every product and page you create in your store will automatically produce a URI. Unfortunately, they will – by default – be long, unhelpful to the user, and downright ugly. Miva will produce a “legacy URL” for the product that will give you a long string of characters that are seemingly random. The URL won’t be easily readable, certainly not memorable, and will likely cause other issues with your store.
- The legacy URLs do not play nicely with Google Merchant Center. If you have products that don’t match your URI formatting, you will likely get errors from GMC, causing those items to be removed from your Google Shopping Ads.
- Search engines don’t like the legacy-style URLs. Google looks at several different URL factors in their ranking algorithm. Have a long, unreadable URL full of “unsafe” characters? That’s going to hurt your SEO, big time.
- Those unsafe characters mentioned in the previous point don’t just make your URL hard to read, they can break your page. Some browsers interact differently with certain characters, leading to big usability problems for unwieldy URLs.
Thankfully, generating URIs is a very simple process in Miva, and we’ll walk you through it now!
Step One: Access URI Management
Let’s take a look at the test product called Shirt 1. The supplier has just started offering a new product line. We’ve uploaded all the products via an Excel spreadsheet, and now Shirt 1 doesn’t have a structured URI, so it appears as a long string of identifiers produced by Miva. This URI won’t be helpful for SEO, Google Ads, and it’s not readable for the shoppers.
To fix it:
- Log into your Miva Admin account. Select the Settings menu in the bottom left corner
- Choose URI Management from the pop-up menu.
Step Two: Generate Your URIs
3. Select the URIs tab. This screen will show you a database of all the URIs on your website. They will include products, categories, and pages (like FAQ and your basket).
4. Click the Generate button. A new window will pop up that will allow you to make selections.
5. Choose which URIs you’d like to generate using the checkboxes.
6. Make sure Generate URIs Only When None Exist is selected.
7. Click the blue Generate button.
Now, when we view the product online, you’ll see the URL is structured according to the store settings, in an informative, readable, and optimized way that matches the product name.
| From: gd-build.com/mm5/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Product_Code=newshirt To: gd-build.com/new-shirt.html |
And that’s it! A simple two step process of logging in then clicking Generate will produce formatted URIs for every product in your store that may be missing one. If you need a hand configuring your URI settings, or run into errors, let us know and we can help.