Duplicate URLs (2.0.20b) - Product that goes into 2 categories

[Jessica28]

Hello guys,
I have a quick question, I have VM 2.0.20b and Joomla! 2.5.9
I am not using any SEF or extra components to help the SEO just the core one from VM.

But when I put 1 product in 2 categories then it creates 2 URL's (for example product ABC)

category-1/ABC-detail.html
category-2/ABC-detail.html

From what I know this is not the best for SEO (as it's the same page just 2 different URLs.

Thank you.

[jjk]

Search engines know that shops often display a certain product through different urls. They don't consider this to be duplicate content and they normally pick just one of the available urls for their index. See here: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&hlrm=de&answer=139394
VirtueMart already sorts out most of the possible links by adding a rel="canonical" to a product details page.

[TeeJay.net]

The truth is that canonical only prevents penalty from Google (and possibly other search engines), but having 2 different URLs for one product still hurts SEO a lot. Why? Because you dissipate the backlinks to your product. Some backlinks may go to one of the URLs created, and other backlinks may go to the other URL. Then, the benefit to your position in google search results from backlinks is lesser.

[jjk]

...but having 2 different URLs for one product still hurts SEO a lot.

Where did you read that? I'm pretty shure you didn't find that on Google's webmaster blog. Actually approximately half a year ago Google's Matt Cuts mentioned that "Pagerank is becoming depreciated". There are plenty of more important factors which affect your ranking in the search results. CMS systems like Joomla allow the user to sort and filter content. So a number of different urls for the same canonical page are absolutely normal. If you want to prevent this, you would have to go back to old technology of static websites.

[atrus]

Still, i also think it makes no sense having a product in 10 or more categories and getting different URLs leading to the same flypage, i don't see the reason. Especially when you can just have only 1 link of the form:

/ABC-detail.html

Above helps also in managing your sitemaps. The best thing would be to add an option in VM2 configuration (SEO Tab), not to include the category name in the URL, and problem solved.

This is the reason we use Joomsef instead of VM2 router. And believe me, i'd prefer to use VM2 SEF instead, all these 3rd party SEF components are a pain in terms of performance.

Rgrds,
Chris