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[Sergey Romanov]

Hello,

i am developer of JPromoter. This component crawl the site and then allow edit meta on every page of the site of any component.

Recently I discovered problem that it hardly index VM. First I thought that is is server error of my client but then I git the problem. When user or crawler first get to VM page it produce 301 error to the same page with &vmcchk=1 added. That is Ok. I have solved that. I catch this error code, record this page as empty and try to open page where I have been redirected to. but since CURL crawler do not remember the cookie this page again move me to the same page and my crawler do not scan the same URL twice within one indexation process.

Is it possible to turn off this checker?
DO you think it is SE compatible?

[Sergey Romanov]

Hard to answer?

[Soeren]

Hi,

you can remove the check in line 63 in the file /classes/ps_session.php:

Code:

if( @$_REQUEST['option'] == 'com_virtuemart' && USE_AS_CATALOGUE == '' ) {
$this->doCookieCheck(); // Introduced to check if the user-agent accepts cookies
}

Maybe we can check at this stage if that the user agent is not a bot or something like that.

ciao, Sören

[Sergey Romanov]

Ok. I can easily avoid that error. I can track cookie by crawler. But I am interested is it normal behavior for other crawlers? I mean is this error met by Google or other? Is this ok for SEO?

[Adam Bazaroff]

Is this ok for SEO?

It is very very bad for SEO
I hate that f**g "&vmcchk=1" Google show terrible URLs for my site...

Code:

http://www.mysite.com/component/page,shop.browse/category_id,56/option,com_virtuemart/Itemid,26/index.php?page=shop.browse&category_id=56&option=com_virtuemart&Itemid=26&vmcchk=1

arrrgghh...

[Sergey Romanov]

i wounder why they still not deleted this &vmcchk=1 from the code. It is worst thing available for SE.

[Vdub]

you can remove the check in line 63 in the file /classes/ps_session.php:

Code:

if( @$_REQUEST['option'] == 'com_virtuemart' && USE_AS_CATALOGUE == '' ) {
$this->doCookieCheck(); // Introduced to check if the user-agent accepts cookies
}

If I understand this correctly, I can remove line 63 to stop the &vmcchk=1 problem I have with Google. But will this have any detrimental effect to customers using the site

[Lee]

But will this have any detrimental effect to customers using the site

Vdub did you ever get an answer?

I too would like to disable the vmcchk code because of the 301 redirect that results which clearly pisses off google.

[Lee]

Well, without knowing how to improve the vmcchk code to distinguish bots from human visitors (as Sören suggested), I commented it out 3 weeks ago. 

I have seen no ill effects on my site from doing so.  I've had orders placed and processed successfully and all other functionality seems normal. 

Importantly, Google stopped giving me warnings about too many redirects while crawling my site.

If anybody wants to upgrade the vmcchk code so we can safely re-implement it, have it at!

[Peter Clements]

Well, without knowing how to improve the vmcchk code to distinguish bots from human visitors (as Sören suggested), I commented it out 3 weeks ago. 
I have seen no ill effects on my site from doing so.  I've had orders placed and processed successfully and all other functionality seems normal. 
Importantly, Google stopped giving me warnings about too many redirects while crawling my site.
If anybody wants to upgrade the vmcchk code so we can safely re-implement it, have it at!

I've just commented that line out on one of our sites too.

Are you still finding everything running OK?

I think this may well solve about a million and one issues, one being SEO.

You don't want to go down the path of checking to see if a site visitor is a bot or not, it's a very dangerous one.

[Chris Silva]

I have done the same thing and had it work although there HAS to be a more elegant solution if Virtuemart is to call itself a viable solution.  Our site http://mitcables.com has suffered a few months until I finally found this and commented out the lines.  I think the checking is important, but I guess only until the customer is checking out.

[xDenisk]

Hello. Can you tell me may i rebuild the VMCHK?