Search Engines finding VM Pages that are not part of menu structure

[siobhano]

I am using a joomla menu structure to navigate users thru my category and product offerings. All pages that are part of menu structure come up well in SE results and display just fine. However search engines are also finding VM auto generated pages such as a generic category list page and a bunch of pages associated with a product scroller that I am using.  These pages are not displaying well because they have incorrect template applied. Ideally I would like to understand how to apply the correct template to these pages. Alternatively - is there a way to disable the generation of these pages AND/OR prevent the crawlers from finding these pages ?

Any help on this much appreciated

[jjk]

If those pages which are not displayed well are those associated with your product scroller, I would suggest to ask the developer of your product scroller how to prevent that behavior. Perhaps he is able to fix the problem.

The crawlers will always find multiple ways to your product pages, but that's no problem. Usually the search engines will display your SEF urls on top of the non-sef urls. Also VirtueMart uses canonical urls, which point the search engines to the primary url. Crawling my own shop, Google finds/generates and indexes approimately 2500 urls, but that is almost 2.5 times the number of actual SEF urls pointing to my products.

[siobhano]

Thanks for this advice JJK - I have contacted developer of product scroller and am currently exploring some of his suggestions. Also I especially appreciate your reassuring words about how crawlers work on VM sites and the ordering of sef urls in search results. Looking at things from that perspective, I now understand that it is highly unlikely that anyone but me will ever see the pages that I am concerned about - this really has helped me to lighten up on that front. THANKS