Rel=canonical automatically added to every version of product url

[sajtfokus]

Hi,

I have a product (e.g. a Ball) in two categories (e.g. Toys and Gifts)

So, I can see the same product via 2 different url's:

www mysite com/ toys/ a ball
and
www mysite com/ gifts/ a ball


When I check page source for both url's, I can see automatically added rel=canonical tag on both pages. I guess something's wrong with my VM. I suppose only one of them should have this tag.

VM(ver 2.0.20b), Joomla (ver 2.5.7)

Any ideas how to solve this?

[jjk]

That's not a problem for Google etc. You want your customers to find the 'Ball' if they are looking for a gift and also if they are searching for a toy. The category name is a hint for the search engines what that page content is about. If you tell the search engines "This product is a toy" in the canonical url of the Ball in the gift category, it's likely that it won't be displayed in the search results if somebody searched for a gift. If a product is listed in more than one category, Google usually picks one canonical url which they display. The other ones are being indexed too, but will be hidden in the search results. However, in this case Google displays a note saying: "In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 10 already displayed. If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included."

[sajtfokus]

Thanks, great reply!