Comments on: Use Categories in Product URLs for Magento SEO without Duplicate Content

By: Paul Bates

Paul Bates — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 20:01:54 +0000

Great article however being a bit thick I don’t really know how to patch the Collection.php file (obviously I have to add code somewhere in that file, but where?). ((we won’t upgrade our magento store as it’s too much hassle))

I thought it was quite interesting to see the comment that Google doesn’t penalize duplicate content, this is as I understand is only part of the picture.

If you have a relatively new site it is important to make it very clear to the search engine what your site is all about, effectively dumbing it down to start with so that the search engine gets a grip on exactly what your site is about – in my case bb guns. It was explained to me by my SEO team that the duplicate canonical links just makes it a bit confusing for the bots to quickly identify my sites content, so although I am not being penalized for the content indexing of my site takes longer than it could have.

Anyhoo, If a bit of clarity could be thrown my way in regards to the code insertion it would be greatly appreciated, I am running 1.4.1.1 with multiple storefronts with Yoast canonical url extension installed. And this mod… http://www.theintegrationengineer.com/magento-seo-canonical-links/

By: Elio

Elio — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 11:12:07 +0000

Thank you for your patch Mike.

Like suggested by Vit, it’s better to override the core file (app/code/core/Mage/Catalog/Model/Resource/Eav/Mysql4/Product/Collection.php) with a local file (app/code/local/Mage/Catalog/Model/Resource/Eav/Mysql4/Product/Collection.php), so an upgrade of Magento won’t destroy your changes.

So:
1) create the directory app/code/local/Mage/Catalog/Model/Resource/Eav/Mysql4/Product/
2) copy app/code/core/Mage/Catalog/Model/Resource/Eav/Mysql4/Product/Collection.php to app/code/local/Mage/Catalog/Model/Resource/Eav/Mysql4/Product/Collection.php
3) edit app/code/local/Mage/Catalog/Model/Resource/Eav/Mysql4/Product/Collection.php as suggested by Mike

Don’t forget to disable Canonical Url for products, or you will still have duplicate pages.

I also made 301 redirects from /product.html to /category/subcategory/product.html

By: vit

vit — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 10:37:15 +0000

Thank you Mike for this solution.

I found solution with advanced catalog search results url rewrite.

Magento 1.5.1.0

/app/code/core/Mage/CatalogSearch/Model/Advanced.php:287 add method addUrlRewrite() to $collection:

$collection->addAttributeToSelect(Mage::getSingleton(‘catalog/config’)->getProductAttributes())
->setStore(Mage::app()->getStore())
->addMinimalPrice()
->addTaxPercents()
->addStoreFilter()
->addUrlRewrite();

I override this core file (only prepareProductCollection() function) with my custom model in /app/code/local folder.

By: John

John — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 18:01:51 +0000

Awesome! How about related, upsells and cross sells? Have you done anything about them?

By: Aleksey

Aleksey — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 22:39:07 +0000

Wow, this actually worked for my Magento 1.4.2. Thanks! I spent several days trying to fix this issue.

By: Shaun O'Hagan

Shaun O'Hagan — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 14:51:56 +0000

Mike,
Have you hit the problem with magento canonical urls not having the categories in them. I’m on 1.4.1. I would have thought your code would work to fix this as well – just don’t know where the canonical url creating code is in magento.
Shaun.

By: Mike Smullin

Mike Smullin — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 18:51:12 +0000

if there is, i haven’t found it. i’ll leave this comment up for readers to reply.

By: Andrew

Andrew — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 14:59:17 +0000

Hi Mike,

Thank you very much for sharing your solution!

We implemented your patch on a client’s website (powered by Magento 1.4.0) by commenting out exactly the line that you mentioned, and it worked perfectly! Great work on your part.

We seem to have the same problem as René for our section “new products” and we are still looking for a solution. I’ll post our findings here when we do find a solution.

Best regards,

Andrew

By: James Anelay

James Anelay — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 10:41:07 +0000

Hi, Nice solution, I used this on my last magento install and it worked great. Im in the process of another install, do you still feel this is the best solution to the problem, or have things changed? afterall its been a year.

By: Tonkywonky

Tonkywonky — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 06:57:42 +0000

Folks, this is what the canonical tag is for!

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html

As the nice man at Google says in this article “Additional URL properties, like PageRank and related signals, are transferred as well.”

Yes they are!

So it will index your preferred URL if you have multiple category paths, and importantly transfer link juice to that single page from other links pointing to it.

And you don’t have to force users to see a URL in another category from where they expect to be.

Its what the canonical tag was invented for!

We’ve found category URLs are much better for SEO, especially for a big site and it avoids having to put category, and product manufacturer info into each page name.

Unfortunately Magento doesn’t appear to support canonical links as standard (not in my version) but google for add-ons that do this.