SEF & SE URL problem

[guybr]

I don't know how to call this problem: on the course of making my site multilingual (adding EN-GB, German and Hebrew), I had everything set to run with SEF (Joomla's own).

I had most of my German language categories translated when for some reason, my Hebrew pages (whose categories I hadn't started translating) started linking to my German Category URLs - and my German category links either brought me to 404 errors or rerouted me back to the homepage.

Question 1: any idea what causes that??

To solve that mess I turned the SEF off - but I'd like to use SEF if at all possible. However I ran into a new problem: all my site URLs in search engine results are pulling up odd, incomplete pages (missing menus etc). I see in the redirect component a lot of URLs listed (which I didn't put there).

Question 2: any ideas what happened and how to handle the problem with the SE results?

[jjk]

Difficult to say what the source of the problem is. Can you provide a link to your site here, so we can have a look at your frontend? Make shure that you have three menu modules, one for each language and all menu items configured for all three languages. Otherwise the router will probably cause errors.

[guybr]

Do you need to have me put SEF back on?

My site is: historama.com. The main page is a Joomla page and the "online shop" link in the top blue nav bar is the VM homepage.

And for the wierd SE results, if you google "Hitelmacher hat", on the results click the link that contains the words "online-history-store". On that page you'll see the item details but the page is missing my top blue nav bar and pretty much all of the menus and modules which should appear in the side-bar...


...checking those results further it looks like Google kept my SEF links on record and now that I turned SEF off, the results for that search - on PC - are leading to my homepage (and on iOS it leads to a messed up version of the page without all the menus)

...and now I'm discovering another even more disturbing problem: some of my site links lead to pages with all my modules and menus displaying and some are not (for example, all my swmenupro menu links). The difference seems to be in the inclusion or exclusion of "itemid" in the URL:
This link leads to a 'good' page:
http://historama.com/online-history-store/index.php?option=com_virtuemart&view=category&virtuemart_category_id=69&Itemid=618&lang=de

This link leads to a stripped down version of the same page:
http://historama.com/online-history-store/index.php?option=com_virtuemart&view=category&virtuemart_category_id=69&categorylayout=0&Itemid=659&lang=de

What I see on my own site is that manually added links in my content render fine, but links from things like the swmenupro module (and even the djmediatools gallery module) are leading to stripped down pages. Why should that be happening?

- I have a djmediatools gallery on my VM homepage and it links fine to the product details pages, but an identical gallery on my site homepage leads to stripped down pages

- for German and Hebrew to work on swmenupro I created the full category menus in Joomla so the module could see those categories and their links - so why are those URLs coming out messed up? They reference "categorylayout" because I had to select that option when creating the menu items - but still, why should that be rendering stripped down pages?

[guybr]

Checking further I see this:

For EN-GB, the common denominator in my in-site link problem is that links to VM pages which originate from the VM homepage - render fine; links to VM pages (via modules) from the site homepage (a joomla page) lead to messed up versions of the same VM pages.

For German and Hebrew, where I had to create Joomla menus with all the categories, so the swmenupro module could display the categories and links, the pages appear messed up regardless of whether I access them from the site homepage or from the VM homepage (because the URLs reference "categorylayout", which for some reason doesn't display the page as it should). In checking the menu item configuration, when I select "category layout" the base URL it assigns is: index.php?option=com_virtuemart&view=category. I don't know how the "categorylayout" label is entering the final URL address...

BUT WHY??

Similiar problems occurred before while I was using MetaMod to display my menus, and over there Stephen did some checks and found possible problems with the VM router function (http://www.metamodpro.com/forums/topic?id=2315) - any suggestions how I can fix that?

Since my own inserted hyperlinks (in custom html modules) work fine - is there a way to edit the menu links in the Joomla menu manager or from some other location so that modules that rely on those links will reference the correct addresses?