#889 – Two urls created for one Virtuemart product

 Hello Support

I have noticed the there have been 2 urls created for each Virtuemart product, one with category id and the other without.

Google master tools have been reporting these back to us as 'Duplicate meta descriptions' and 'Duplicate title tags'.

We have been using urls with the last category included and would like to know how to avoid the ones without category id (last if more than one level category) generated. I have deleted the duplicated ones without category id from url manager, but once the product is clicked from the front end, the url will return.

your support on this is much appreciated.

best regards

En jie

Hi,

This is the way joomla works. That said tho, I have also to say that sh404SEF has options for the categories and selecting none will result to just one URL for every product. The only thing in this case is that the URLs with the categories are gonna show up as duplicates in sh404SEF, and this might require some further adjustments (depending on the amount of products this might be easy or bit harder to achieve).
Also the option for the top category works fine as well!

Regards

Hello Support

Thank you for the reply.

I am not entirely clear however about your above recommendation/solution.
1. "That said tho, I have also to say that sh404SEF has options for the categories and selecting none will result to just one URL for every product. " Are you suggesting to configure the Virtuemart extention under sh404sef configuration as attached?

2."Also the option for the top category works fine as well!". Are you indicating if the option 'top one only' under 'insert categories' is used instead of the 'last one only', there will be only be one url generated for each product?




Best regards

En Jie

Hi,

That configuration should be fine.

Regards

Hello Support

Thanks again for the reply.

As indicated above, we have traditionally used a category (most of our products have got only one category) and we would like to keep this tradition. I therefore like to have it confirmed about the second option 'Also the option for the top category works fine as well!'. Has it got any duplication issues or other complications that I am not aware of?

Best regards

En Jie

Hi,

You should not experience any duplicate content penalty using the top category option.
By the way did you set up menus for each category?

Regards

Hello

1/ Yes, there is a menu item for each category (www.xxxx.com.au). There are also a couple of menu items (tea-shop/premium-loose-tea.html ; tea-shop/herbal-teas.html; tea-shop/tea-gift.html ) pointing to the to top category level (shop front page, I was trying to avoid this but not possible at the current menu layout- I am using canonical urls to indicate they are the same content).

The reason I decided to use categories in the urls instead of item_id is that it is more likely for the menus to change in the future than categories.

2/ Do you have any documentation on this? It would be great if there is one to have the comparisons and recommendations.

regards

En Jie

Hi,

Unfortunately documentation will not be very helpful here. It is more down to the ability to get a structure that is both functional, easy and that won’t trigger the Joomla’s router to create a lot of URLs for that same content.
But if your canonical tags are set, then you should be absolutely fine.

Regards