SEO

Search engine optimization in Smartstore revolves around human readable URLs, meta data and machine consumable resources such as robots.txt and the XML sitemap. The framework ships with sensible defaults but allows full customization through services and settings.

URL slugs

Entities that implement ISlugSupported (products, categories, topics, manufacturers ...) persist their slugs in the UrlRecord table, one per language. The IUrlService validates and applies unique slugs and keeps historical entries for 301 redirects when a slug changes.

var result = await _urlService.ValidateSlugAsync(product,
    seName: myNewSlug,
    displayName: product.Name,
    ensureNotEmpty: true);
await _urlService.ApplySlugAsync(result, save: true);

Meta information

SeoSettings provides global defaults for MetaTitle, MetaDescription and MetaKeywords. Most storefront entities expose matching properties so editors can override them per language in the administration area.

Canonical URLs and policies

UrlPolicy compares each request against SeoSettings (host rule, HTTPS, trailing slash) and triggers a permanent redirect when needed. Enabling CanonicalUrlsEnabled renders a canonical <link> tag, and AddAlternateHtmlLinks injects hreflang links for localized pages.

Robots and sitemaps

The robots.txt endpoint merges SeoSettings.DefaultRobotDisallows with ExtraRobotsDisallows, ExtraRobotsAllows and optional ExtraRobotsLines to control crawler access.

IXmlSitemapPublisher builds sitemap.xml and can include categories, manufacturers, products, topics, blog, news and forum entries according to the XmlSitemapIncludes* flags in settings. Alternate links per language are emitted when XmlSitemapIncludesAlternateLinks is enabled.

JSON-LD structured data

JsonLdBuilder (accessible via Assets.JsonLd in views) collects typed JSON-LD fragments per page and renders them as <script type="application/ld+json"> blocks. Each fragment represents one schema.org type and exposes a fluent API.

Shortcut properties exist for the most common root types: Assets.JsonLd.Product, .BreadcrumbList, .BlogPosting, .Organization, .WebSite. Each call to a shortcut returns the same fragment for that type, so multiple partials can contribute incrementally.

// In a Razor partial — contribute from anywhere, order doesn't matter
Assets.JsonLd.Product
    .Prop("name", Model.Name)
    .Prop("sku", Model.Sku)
    .Obj("brand", "Brand", new { name = Model.Brand })
    .Obj("offers", "Offer", new
    {
        price = Model.Price.FinalPrice,
        priceCurrency = Model.Price.CurrencyCode
    });

Anonymous objects use type (without @) as a convention — the framework normalizes it to @type automatically, so you never have to write @-prefixed keys in C# anonymous types.

For nested arrays (e.g. shippingDetails), build the items explicitly and use Arr(...):

var offer = JsonLdFragment.Create("Offer", new { price = ..., priceCurrency = ... });

var items = shippingList.Select(s => JsonLdFragment.Create("OfferShippingDetails", new
{
    shippingDestination = new { type = "DefinedRegion", addressCountry = s.CountryCode },
    shippingRate = new { type = "MonetaryAmount", value = s.Cost, currency = s.CurrencyCode }
}));

offer.Arr("shippingDetails", items);
Assets.JsonLd.Product.Obj("offers", offer);

Structured data is always emitted regardless of UI visibility flags — if the data exists, include it.

Properties with null values are silently ignored and never written to the output.

Character conversion

To keep URLs readable across languages, Smartstore converts special characters according to SeoNameCharConversion. Set ConvertNonWesternChars to false or AllowUnicodeCharsInUrls to permit full Unicode slugs when appropriate.