Understanding slugs and product alias to not have duplicate content

[timbate]

Hi All

I wonder if someone could lend some advice on the below.

We are using joomla 2.5.11, php 5.3.3 and virtuemart 2.0.20b

We use csvi to upload both categories and products, and use slugs to create sef aliases

Recently amended some category slugs which has raised concerns over possible duplicate content being indexed.

As an example:

Our old full url to one product was:
http://www.displayboardsdirect.co.uk/mobile-whiteboards/Mobile-Writing-Whiteboard-Magnetic-1200-x-900-Landscape.html

which we later changed to:
http://www.displayboardsdirect.co.uk/mobile-portable-freestanding-whiteboards-on-wheels/magnetic-mobile-whiteboards-on-wheels/Mobile-Writing-Whiteboard-Magnetic-1200-x-900-Landscape.html

I was later surprised to see that both the old and new url still worked and raised concerns over duplicate content (as the old url was already indexed by Google)

At a product level our alias for this product is:
Mobile-Writing-Whiteboard-Magnetic-1200-x-900-Landscape
so you can also get to the product with the shorter url:
http://www.displayboardsdirect.co.uk/Mobile-Writing-Whiteboard-Magnetic-1200-x-900-Landscape.html

When experimenting it seems that any url will work providing it starts "http://www.displayboardsdirect.co.uk/" and ends "Mobile-Writing-Whiteboard-Magnetic-1200-x-900-Landscape.html"

e.g this still works: http://www.displayboardsdirect.co.uk/anythinginthemiddle/Mobile-Writing-Whiteboard-Magnetic-1200-x-900-Landscape.html

We dont want to have mulitple urls indexed for the same page and would appreciate any advice to prevent. Is it better to have the product slug/alias the full sef url including category heirachy?

Kind regards

Tim

[Maxim Pishnyak]

Why it looks like your product belongs to different categories at one time?

Did you study canonical behavior for different urls?

[timbate]

Hi Maxim,

No we just used csvi uploader and a slug to populate the alias field for both category and product uploads.

When we amended some category slugs we noticed that both the old and new url still worked. Then investigating could see providing the url started

http://www.displayboardsdirect.co.uk/

and then ended with the product e.g /Mobile-Writing-Whiteboard-Magnetic-1200-x-900-Landscape.html

....then anything in the middle of the url didnt matter.

Any advice would be welcome

Kind regards

Tim

[Maxim Pishnyak]

....then anything in the middle of the url didnt matter.

It's normal VM behavior.

Why it looks like your product belongs to different categories at one time?

How you could access these unwanted urls?

Did you study canonical behavior for different urls?

[franzpeter]

This url: mobile-whiteboards/Mobile-Writing-Whiteboard-Magnetic-1200-x-900-Landscape.html has a link url like /mobile-portable-freestanding-whiteboards-on-wheels/magnetic-mobile-whiteboards-on-wheels/Mobile-Writing-Whiteboard-Magnetic-1200-x-900-Landscape.html" rel="canonical". So VM does it in the correct way. It tells crawlers if they reach mobile-whiteboards/Mobile-Writing-Whiteboard-Magnetic-1200-x-900-Landscape.html that the canonical url for that product is the second link. So everything works fine.