Virtuemart SEO 1 - Beware of the Modules

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Virtuemart

Sep

2007

Virtuemart SEO 1 - Beware of the Modules

Virtuemart SEO Every day this week we're providing tips and tricks to help you improve the Search Engine Optimization of your Virtuemart shopping cart.

Tip 1: Beware of Virtuemart's Modules

We've talked often before about Duplicate Content and how it can cause searchbots to crawl your site less effectively. There are some major potential culprit in Virtuemart ... the modules.

Example URLs

We're going to use the demo on the Virtuemart site as an example and in particular the Power Sander. Here are three different URLs you can use to get to the same page:

What's Causing This Problem?

Very simply, each module has the same information but in a different order.

Going through the cart:

Layout / Product ID / Category ID

Latest Products Module:

Category ID / Layout / Product ID

Last Viewed Option on Flypage:

Product ID / Category ID / Layout

Whats the Solution?

Simply test the modules that you're using on the site. Some such as Top Ten Products work fine and won't cause you any problems. Other modules will need to be dealt with more carefully. The best way to do that is by using a combination of robots.txt and Search Engine Friendly URLs. Coincidentally, that will be tomorrow's topic as we take you through the best options for setting up SEF URLs on your Virtuemart site.

Comments

#1 Thomas Kahl 2007-09-03 16:40

First: the problem is the stupid way the SEF-tools (as far as i know them) store the real URLs. They just take the string and put it in the DB. Then, off course, any difference in the string will not match the entry.

The SEF-tools have lots of more or less usefull functions. But none of them has a good database-design. It is not so hard (with a little bit of SQL-knowledge) to create a db-structure that stores every parameter and the parameter-name in separate fields. With this structure, the order of the parameters doesn't matter. Component specific plugins could also manage how missing parameters are handled (very useful for virtuemart!).

Best of all would off course be a htaccess-solution, but this would require a completely different component-management in joomla. I have written a pure htaccess-sef for sites that don't use a lot of different components. Unfortunately this solution has to be adjusted for each installed component. But it works - faster and cleaner than all sef-tools i have tried yet.

I'm really tired of sef-tables with thousands of duplicate entries when there are a lot of content-items or vm-products. They are slowly and hard to manage (and produce ugly urls when thy start to count the numbers up...).

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#2 Yannick Gaultier 2007-09-04 01:53

Hi Thomas,

Fortunately, I trust it's been some time since you checked out the SEF tools and things are not so bad these days. Can't talk for the other, but sh404SEF takes some simple steps to avoid what Steve describes above. In such cases, there will be only one URL stored in the DB and in the URL disk cache. There may still be thousands of duplicate entries in DB (though you can decide through backend param whether you want to store them or not), but they all come from Itemid not being the same!
Regards

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#3 Yannick Gaultier 2007-09-04 01:55

Besides, the issue mentionned here has nothing to do with SEF tools ! it is a VM issue, that may be solved through using a SEF components

Regards

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#4 Steve Burge 2007-09-04 20:26

Hi Thomas

You're right to an extent, but Shumisha is right also. The key problem with VM is that its a large and complex project being handled by a relatively small team. They need more hands on board to keep the project growing and improving. Shumisha is right - hes working to overcome some coding problems in VM and its addons.

The older versions of SEF components did used to pile up 1000s of links in the database table until the site almost ground to a halt. Some components such as SEF Advance solve this by not storing the URLs but only caching them. He elegantly outlines the solution he uses in sh404SEF above.

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#5 chris keiser 2008-10-04 12:12

i am using vm 1.5.7 and my products do not have sef url's which it seems is common but, we tried the plugin sh404SEF which crashed the whole site. awesome. so that didn't work, now what. most of our products aren't showing up at all in search engines. help!

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#6 Steve Burge 2008-10-04 13:07

Hi Chris

That's not very much information for us to go on. If you're looking for help to get up and running, the SEO Club might work for you.

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#7 L. K. Lalitesh 2009-03-30 09:39

I have written a small code (router.php) to be used for Virtuemart that converts your URL to SEF mode without installing any third party SEF component.

You can check the detauls here: extensions.joomla.org/extensions/extension-specific/virtuemart-extensions/7512/details

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