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

By: Shaun O'Hagan

Shaun O'Hagan — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 15:50:44 +0000

Hi Mike,
I’ve found an answer to my own question. I tested that before the fix doing a search on my store always brought back products with simple product urls. After applying the fix the results come back as full category based urls. Cool.
Nice work
Shaun.

By: Magento SEO

Magento SEO — Sat, 23 May 2009 14:55:31 +0000

[...] Mike Smullin has already taken care of this with his easy tweak. Visit Mike’s post about this here. This requires one small modification to Magneto core, so hopefully someone will write an extension [...]

By: Joost de Valk

Joost de Valk — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 14:20:17 +0000

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By: René

René — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 11:07:26 +0000

Thanks for sharing this solution, Mike. It worked out pretty good for all the links on my shop – except for the products in the my block “new products”. The URL is untouched and this in the form root/product.html.

I check my template and it calls the product link via echo $_product->getProductUrl() and returns the “faulty” URL. Could you give me a hint how to change these as well into SEO friedly links without losing link juice?

By: Mike Smullin

Mike Smullin — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 23:16:51 +0000

@matt: Yep, you’ve correctly identified it is because you’ve got products in multiple categories. My setup has only one category per product, so that’s as far as I wanted to develop the patch.

If you end up taking it further to where it can work with multiple categories, please feel free to post your link here and let me know.

By: matt

matt — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 13:36:51 +0000

hm, this code fix isn’t doing it for me. I’ve got products in multiple categories, and if I arrive at each product through a different category, then the URL ends up being unique for that category assignment …

By: matt

matt — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 13:26:50 +0000

Stephan – nofollow would only work for the bots and spiders. but if a user comes along and finds a product they like and links to it on their blog, and another user links the same product under a different category URL, then you’ve essentially 1/2′d the link-juice between those two links. So there needs to be a way to “physically” restrict product URLs to just one.

Thanks for sharing the diff, Mike. Gonna give it a shot and see how it works on our setup which we’re launching … tomorrow!

By: Stephan Miller

Stephan Miller — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 05:13:17 +0000

Great post. I have been wondering about this lately. I have been watching sites with 1000 products have over 14,000 urls indexed in Google. That’s a lot of PageRank leakage. It’s one thing to have a big site, but another one altogether to create it from duplicate content. This post will help that a bit.

They need the ability to add nofollow to specific links in Magento, especially empty review pages and the layered attribute navigation. I will be experimenting with nofollowing some of these links in the future to see what’s happens.