VirtueMart Sometimes Causes SEO Problems

Be careful with Virtuemart and your efforts at Search Engine Optimization.

We had an SEO client during January who suffered from an odd problem that has overtaken 2,800 pages according to a Google search. 

It seems that VirtueMart sometimes appends a random set of characters to the end of URLs in other parts of the site. It might be a content page, another component or a static content item, but it can happen to all of them and then end up looking like this:

mydomain.com/contact.html?virtuemart=96380df297565350d754c589f46a4f3a

The problem is easy to miss because the normal URLs work without any problems. The only way to diagnose the issue is to use a search engine to analyze your site.

I don't believe that this can be attributed to any one particular Search Engine Friendly URL tool because we found examples with each of the following setups:

• No SEF URLs at all
• Default Joomla SEF URLs
• Open-SEF

This issue has been raised on the Virtuemart forums and the best that has been produced so far is a work-around rather than a solution. The poster suggests that if the menu links to Virtuemart iare hardcoded rather than created inside of Joomla, the problem can be avoided. However, because the matter was urgent, we ended up disabling VirtueMart on the client's site and I haven't had the chance to test whether this solution really removes the pages from search engine listings.

If you're running VirtueMart and you're not sure it you have this problem, go to Google and search for "inurl:"?virtuemart" and your domain name.

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Your Comments (5)

Sergey Romanov

January 30, 2007

I am developer of JPromoter and I have number of problem with VM and SEO too. I started discussion here http://virtuemart.net/index.ph...ic=24791.0 but that did not attract a much attention.

I think that VM hard for SEO. At lease developers did not keep in mind SEO when coding and only functionality.

JSG

January 30, 2007

I tried to follow your "inurl:"?virtuemart" example but I'm not getting any results in Google. How to do that with domain.com ?

Steve Burge

January 30, 2007

Its a little awkard because each person has different endings

If you have .html on the end of your site for example you can search for "inurl:"html?virtuemart" and your domain name.

I don't want to pick on any site, but just as an example, try..... allinurl:"html?virtuemart" 365hiphopstorm.com

Penn Wooding

May 05, 2008

I have found that even though it's difficult to get a decent description on products in Virtuemart, you can certainly help yourself when naming each product. This nothing wrong with actually giving a good description For the product. If the product you are selling is popular, the search engines will eventually pick up on it and you can get good search results.

PHG

June 18, 2008

We had a problem with SEO friendly URLs with one ISP, but using Virtuemart sh404SEF and disabling AJAX product animation stuff, we got better URL structures eg:

http://www.topclock.co.uk/Wall-clocks/Antique-style-wall-clocks.html

and pagerank bumped up one. Google Checkout is a bit fiddly to integrate - suggest that you do this bit first!