Solution for common SEO mistakes

[franzpeter]

Virtuemart 2 by default includes SEF (Search engine friendly link) optimizations and a lot of SEO optimization features. It is very flexible, especially since the 2.0.22 version. For the shop homepage, all category pages and the product pages, you can create Custom Page Titles, enter Meta Description - that is, what crawlers show with the page links -. You can set meta robots in various ways, tell crawler about your authorship, give images alt tags (that is what you would like to show as tool tip while visitors click on the image). So, there is pretty much to use inside default Virtuemart 2 in case of SEO optimization.

A common mistake, which may have bad influence is the linking of categories or a category inside Joomla menus. Virtuemart 2 needs only 1 link inside the Joomla menu structure to work reliable and in the expected way. So do not mess up your SEO and SEF with Joomla menus by creating links for Virtuemart categories or a single virtuemart category. It is absolutely not necessary for SEF url and may disturb crawler result by penalizing double content. By default, Joomla is not an e-commerce software, so Virtuemart adds ecommerce functionality. To avoid duplicate content issues it is highly recommended to use the Virtuemart Category module instead of creating links inside Joomla menus for that case. It would produce two disadvantages: It slows down the page performance and can have a negative impact on SEF url. If possible VirtueMart Categories Layout as Joomla menu item should be avoided by default. Problem here can occur, if new category get added to Virtuemart Categories inside the VM component,  the categories view from the Joomla menu will show that category, even if there is no menu link for that new added category. The resulting link if selecting that category inside the categories view may produce a wrong link.
So if you do not need to exclude some specific modules from some specific Virtuemart pages: Do not use Joomla menu for linking Virtuemart products or categories. Create just one Joomla menu item with menu item type: Front page.


Creating Joomla menu links for a single category or single products is only recommendable, if a module should appear only on such a specific page. If so select that specific category or that specific product from Components -> VirtueMart -> Products and copy the category name or the product name from the Category Name field or the Product Name field while creating a Joomla menu item. Do not use something else as Menu title, because Joomla does create an alias, which becomes the sef url. Be very carefull and double check, especially if the title contains language specific special characters. The created Alias in the Joomla menu should exactly represent the one VM did already create.

[PRO]

I use Joomla menu only for category TOP LEVEL links.

For me

I dont use the category module, or have ever even published it to look at it.
BUT:
If I have Joomla menu link to every top level category, all things work correctly, even with child categories that do not have a menu link.

[franzpeter]

Pro, did write that for people like me or others, who use VM as Joomla ecommerce solution. I am no speshitpillt for seo and sef purposes but I can confirm, that if not using carefully those menu links and think about before doing that, it can have negative results in case of seo and sef. Professional administrators may know how to do and to use, but not every shop owner has a professional administrator.

[AH]

Franz

Do not use Joomla menu for linking Virtuemart products or categories. Create just one Joomla menu item with menu item type: Front page.

I need to have an horizontal menu that shows my main and sub categories
Similar to the northerntool category menu http://www.northerntool.com/

I am going to use maximenuck  for this purpose as I want an horizontal menu http://www.joomlack.fr/en/joomla-extensions/maximenu-ck with good support for customisation.

This will mean that I create a joomla menu link as type VirtueMart » Category Layout for every category.

I will also create a "shop" link to the main page

I will not use the maximenu category plugin or the vm_category module

Please can you advise as to why this is such a poor solution?

[PRO]

Franz

Do not use Joomla menu for linking Virtuemart products or categories. Create just one Joomla menu item with menu item type: Front page.

I need to have an horizontal menu that shows my main and sub categories
Similar to the northerntool category menu http://www.northerntool.com/

I am going to use maximenuck  for this purpose as I want an horizontal menu http://www.joomlack.fr/en/joomla-extensions/maximenu-ck with good support for customisation.

This will mean that I create a joomla menu link as type VirtueMart » Category Layout for every category.

I will also create a "shop" link to the main page

I will not use the maximenu category plugin or the vm_category module

Please can you advise as to why this is such a poor solution?

I make my menu like this
http://www.kaizenmediaworks.com/multi-column-dropdown-joomla-menu-w-seperate-modules

I dont actually do "multi" columns anymore, but used to.

Each top menu link is a "custom html" module, and I just use JCE editor and browse for the menu item.

[AH]

Hi Pro

Yes I have seen your menu but decided not to build my own as I wanted some better functionality that I can get with just pure css.

I felt I was on the right track by creating joomla menu items linked to the relevant type VirtueMart » Category Layout
For every category. Until I read Franz's post.

I still havent really dug into the seo yet

But from what I can see, if I create a joomla menu item of "category layout"

The link url / meta title and canonical url remain the same for the category

I am clearly missing something here so any help from those who have gone before would be appreciated - I would prefer not to find myself up a creek with no means of lcomotion!

[franzpeter]

Hutson, I use for example a template, which is able to show Virtuemart categories layout and single category layout with the default VM category module. So my categories appear inside the selected Joomla menu as seamless integration. So I do not need to create categories links or category links inside a Joomla menu. Everything what I do in the Virtuemart administration occurs, as soon as I click the save button, inside the Joomla menu. So I have no double maintenance, which is not error or fool proof.
I give you an example: Say we have a shop with clothes for women and men and we want to have two main categories. The first thing would be to link the Virtuemart default page to a Joomla menu as menu item. Say we call it shop. Then we create two Joomla main menu entries, one for women, one for men. Both will get defined as menu item types VirtueMart Categories Layout with Parent Item: Menu Item Root. Now we create some subcategories: For the main category women, we create two subcategories: Clothing and Bags. For men we create: Shoes and Accessories.
So we would get the following url localhost/men/shoes, localhost/men/accessories and localhost/women/clothing and localhost/women/bags. We do now a mass update for categories and products with a tool like CSVI or CSVA or something else to add new products and new categories. Those new things are now imported into the database, visible in the Virtuemart Backend administration and the Virtuemart frontend. Say we did add categories to the main category: Women like Jeans, Shirts a.s.o.. What happens if we go into the Virtuemart frontend: If you click on your Joomla menu item: women (categories layout), you may see now clothing, bags, jeans, shirts. In case of our example with the bags you have a link like: localhost/women/bags. The new imported categories do not have such a link. In case of jeans it looks like: localhost/shop/women/jeans and localhost/shop/women/shirts. You may see the the url differs. Those new categories only follow the same rules in case of url if you create Joomla menu items for those subcategories to, where the parent category is women.

As already told: If you know what to do it may not be a problem. You did switch off the frontend for visitors and crawlers, did your mass import, then did create the new joomla menu structure and then you can reopen your store. Else maybe the crawlers were a little bit faster than you, did crawl those new urls with the /shop/... before you could create those Joomla menu items. And after that you have two url for the same category and the following products inside that category. You may need to create a new rewrite rule a.s.o.

Something like that is barely to maintain if your shop grows and you offer more categories and products. Or if you work with suppliers: Do you know how much categories they did already create as new. You may see that after the import is done. So your daily purpose is to import and correct maybe the problems after and control that crawlers did not already crawl those wrong urls. And you continue to write redirects.

If you have a few static categories, which barely change, it may be a nice idea to link everything into Joomla menu manually. As soon as changes may occur, you may have problems. But indeed, if some people do not have problems, they may want to create a few new so they can say: now i have some too!

[PRO]

I am clearly missing something here so any help from those who have gone before would be appreciated - I would prefer not to find myself up a creek with no means of lcomotion!

seo problems/duplicate content are common problems with ALL CMS systems.

I had major problems when I first launched 1.1 and joomla 1.5

You have to just test & think about things before you go live.

But that is no matter if you use a cms or not.

Sometimes you sacrifice scalability with control, and vice versa.

[franzpeter]

Pro, I agree it is a problem if using a cms and an ecommerce component. In our case it is not a Virtuemart problem and not a joomla problem. But there is a way to prevent those problems. If there are a lot of categories, where it may happen, that adding categories occur by mass update, it is not a very good idea to use Joomla menu system to display all those Virtuemart categories (it is the same with other ecommerce components). Using the VM category module for that prevents it and it has an additional advantage: you do not need to make the work twice. Linking categories, in my opinion, makes only sense if specific modules should appear only in certain category views. So by creating a link, it is possible to exclude them from pages or vice versa.
I would not risk those unnecessary double content things (not only for the category but maybe for 50 or 100 or more products inside that category) just to have a url, which is a little bit shorter than using the default way.
As far as I know, the most important things are the meta description, a good title and good unique content. The url is not of such an importance. But it is just my opinion!

[AH]

Yes, much appreciate all comments.

I managed duplicate content in VM 1 changing many components that created slightly differing URL structures, so I ended up with a single URL for all prods. And 301 redirects for any duplicate content shown in Google webmaster.

The URL never bothered me as long as it was not duplicated due to crudy component coding.

I will not mass import. Categories so am able to create the menu items before products are created.

But I do agree that using VM for categories is best, If only there were a decent VM_category module that allowed good horizontal menu structure as per maximenuck.

I trust that this thread will help others decide on their path for category menus.

[lindapowers]

Virtuemart 2 by default includes SEF (Search engine friendly link) optimizations and a lot of SEO optimization features. It is very flexible, especially since the 2.0.22 version. For the shop homepage, all category pages and the product pages, you can create Custom Page Titles, enter Meta Description - that is, what crawlers show with the page links -. You can set meta robots in various ways, tell crawler about your authorship, give images alt tags (that is what you would like to show as tool tip while visitors click on the image). So, there is pretty much to use inside default Virtuemart 2 in case of SEO optimization.

A common mistake, which may have bad influence is the linking of categories or a category inside Joomla menus. Virtuemart 2 needs only 1 link inside the Joomla menu structure to work reliable and in the expected way. So do not mess up your SEO and SEF with Joomla menus by creating links for Virtuemart categories or a single virtuemart category. It is absolutely not necessary for SEF url and may disturb crawler result by penalizing double content. By default, Joomla is not an e-commerce software, so Virtuemart adds ecommerce functionality. To avoid duplicate content issues it is highly recommended to use the Virtuemart Category module instead of creating links inside Joomla menus for that case. It would produce two disadvantages: It slows down the page performance and can have a negative impact on SEF url. If possible VirtueMart Categories Layout as Joomla menu item should be avoided by default. Problem here can occur, if new category get added to Virtuemart Categories inside the VM component,  the categories view from the Joomla menu will show that category, even if there is no menu link for that new added category. The resulting link if selecting that category inside the categories view may produce a wrong link.
So if you do not need to exclude some specific modules from some specific Virtuemart pages: Do not use Joomla menu for linking Virtuemart products or categories. Create just one Joomla menu item with menu item type: Front page.


Creating Joomla menu links for a single category or single products is only recommendable, if a module should appear only on such a specific page. If so select that specific category or that specific product from Components -> VirtueMart -> Products and copy the category name or the product name from the Category Name field or the Product Name field while creating a Joomla menu item. Do not use something else as Menu title, because Joomla does create an alias, which becomes the sef url. Be very carefull and double check, especially if the title contains language specific special characters. The created Alias in the Joomla menu should exactly represent the one VM did already create.

Interesting and agree with most said, just a detail "Virtuemart 2 needs only 1 link per language"

In a multilingual website you need 1 link per language, I've encountered dozens of users which as me were confused and had trouble when creating their multilingual website due to the popular "create one link only for VM". This is not true, although I know some of you just use the same menu item, each language needs its own menu for VM, its own translation for the menu name itself and meta title (yes you can have just one menu with same name for languages and use the metatitle from VM but this is NOT the correct way as you need to asign template clones per language and menu items to this templates +  you wont be able to assign different modules in different languages)

"Create just one Joomla menu item with menu item type: Front page VM"

Don't know if you mean one instance only of that menu but I don't see any problem in creating a part from that menu another one for VM categories, even more, this is required if you are using Xmap and want your products and categories showing at your sitemap - but ok this is a 3rd party issue or you can do as PRO and create menu links per category. Yes you can do the sitemap with CSVI or another manual solution but in terms of easy use most people will use Xmap and sadly the products are not read if you dont have one of this 2 options.

Even forgetting the sitemap issue, why should having a menu item for the shop homepage and another for categories be a problem? one has the description of the shop and the other just the categories which point to the same URL, different content to same URL doesn't seem bad for me, there are internal links which give flexibility to the customer, doubt google counts that as duplicated content.

Regards

[franzpeter]

lindapowers, if the provided link is your webpage let me first say: it looks excellent with an excellent taste of connecting a template with the content, especially because the colors fit perfectly together and perfectly fit to the products you offer. But, why do you use a category module instead of linking main and sub categories as Joomla menu item? Indeed you show categories twice while using Joomla menu, first instance is the VM Homepage with the categories and than another link with menu item VM categories. The VM homepage (shop startpage) shows the categories and the category module shows the categories. Using the categories menu item (without the category module) shows the second time the categories. Could you please explain me the deeper sense of that. I do not want to critisize that approach, but I do not understand the deeper sense of that. Could you please explain.

[lindapowers]

lindapowers, if the provided link is your webpage let me first say: it looks excellent with an excellent taste of connecting a template with the content, especially because the colors fit perfectly together and perfectly fit to the products you offer. But, why do you use a category module instead of linking main and sub categories as Joomla menu item? Indeed you show categories twice while using Joomla menu, first instance is the VM Homepage with the categories and than another link with menu item VM categories. The VM homepage (shop startpage) shows the categories and the category module shows the categories. Using the categories menu item (without the category module) shows the second time the categories. Could you please explain me the deeper sense of that. I do not want to critisize that approach, but I do not understand the deeper sense of that. Could you please explain.

Hello Franzpeter thanks for your comments. You are totally right about the category menu item and if we use it is cause a 3rd party plugin forces us to use it: Xmap

Xmap doesn't read the products inside the VM menu item to the shop homepage so you have to create either menu items to each category or what we did, a menu item for all parent categories (whe only use parent categories).  That way products get listed in the sitemap with each category.

About the VM category module, yes it shows only the categories, however the VM homepage shows also a description for the shop. The use of the category module is just "marketing" ill say, we have some customers over 60 and we try to easily show the different products without them having to navigate much. Both point to the same URL in different pages with different content so I don't think that should affect much, maybe im wrong.

About the VM category page I hate having to use that and we did it exclusively for Xmap.

Regards

[jjk]

...To avoid duplicate content issues...

Just wanted to mention that having i.e. 10 different urls pointing to the same product in a shop using a CMS is not considered malicious duplicate content by the search engines.
Google states that in various places. One of them is this one: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66359?hl=en

[lindapowers]

...To avoid duplicate content issues...

Just wanted to mention that having i.e. 10 different urls pointing to the same product in a shop using a CMS is not considered malicious duplicate content by the search engines.
Google states that in various places. One of them is this one: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66359?hl=en

Agree with you, was gonna mention something about that too. Correct me if im wrong but internal links are supposed to help you too in SEO terms if the page has a logical structure, we use keywords linking to different sections of our website in articles from our news section and blog.

Regards