Magento Help - urls work with upper and lower case!

[LianneF]

Hi
I'm starting to wish I never chose Magento as it's a nightmare with all the multiple urls for each product! I've had to 301 loads of urls to try and avoid duplicate content and luckily only have a few pages and not 1000's!

Anyway I've found another problem, if you type in a url in lower case or capitals or a combination of both then it still works so I have duplicate content. i.e /shipping and /Shipping

I also seem to have duplicate content for pages with https and http as google is picking up both urls.

I also have a problem where google is seeing duplicate pages and there is just a /on the end so gallery and gallery/ this has happened for all my gallery categories and have no clue why, I've emailed the company who built the extension but not really expecting any help.

Surely everyone with a magento site must have these problems or have I missed some settings that I need to change?

Thanks in advance for any help you can give me.
Lianne

 

[JonathanSEO]

Sounds like you have the worlds worst Magento install.

Those things shouldn't happen when it's configured correctly. Best ecommerce platform by a mile.

Who installed it for you on your host? Sounds like issues with htaccess and a few other things.

Hopefully one of the hosting guys here can help you.

 

[webstore]

Magento is awesome but you do need to invest a serious amount of time to learn how to use it. If you are entering your products via browser then Magento will auto create urls for you and likewise if you use one of the comprehensive .csv import routines that will do the same. (Not sure about the standard one since I have never used that). In fact I have never ever created a product or catalogue URL in Magento - I just leave that for Magento to do.

Just had a look at your site - looks good but have noticed your URLs end with html and removing those might help improve SEO - just a little. To do that go to system >> configuration >> catalog >> search engine optimisations and then for Product URL Suffix and Category URL Suffix remove .html and then run a cache refresh.

Just think when you have mastered Magento there's a path to on-line shop Apps and the Magento video at http://youtu.be/CZiB2_8AB88 should inspire you to keep going.

 

[abstractindigo]

Have you switched on Canonical URLs?

Configuration -> Catalogue -> Search Engine Optimisations -> Use Canonical URLs -> Yes

This will resolve most of the duplicate URL issues.

I would also recommend Google Webmaster Tools for more up to date data than just searching in Google. The duplicates will still appear in the index for weeks/months after you've fixed the source of the issue, but the warnings in Webmaster tools should disappear sooner.

Hope this helps!

Euan

 

[JonathanSEO]

Just had a look at your site - looks good but have noticed your URLs end with html and removing those might help improve SEO - just a little. To do that go to system >> configuration >> catalog >> search engine optimisations and then for Product URL Suffix and Category URL Suffix remove .html and then run a cache refresh.

How would removing .html off the URL's help SEO?

 

[LianneF]

Hi, I have a yes next to each of these and had this from the beginning I think.

Use Categories Path for Product URLs
Create Permanent Redirect for URLs if URL Key Changed
Use Canonical Link Meta Tag For Categories
Use Canonical Link Meta Tag For Products

I haven't imported any products from .csv they were all added manually and I think the urls would have been auto generated by Magento as I don't type anything in the url box when adding a product.

I have an oscommerce site too and just tried changing a letter in the url to a capital and it still worked so maybe this is correct practice? However putting a /on the end caused a 404 error.

Thanks
Lianne

 

[webstore]

How would removing .html off the URL's help SEO?

Its a built-in function to Magento and several other ecommerce systems offer the same option to display URLs without .html

You need to have your URL as clean and relevant as possible and having .html on the end makes it look like clutter to both the eye and search engines. You never see it used on pages from Google, FaceBook, Twitter etc etc so I guess one day it will be deprecated.

 

[Holopainen]

Hello,
did you enable SEO friendly urls?

Follow these steps:

Login to Magento admin panel.
Click on Configuration button and proceed to System menu.
Select Web page in the left side panel.
Go to the Search Engine Optimization tab.
Confirm Use Web Server Rewrites (mark as Yes).
Save config to apply the changes.

Here are some other tips on how to make your Magento SEO friendly.
AS to your problem I would suggest you to read some threads at Magento Commerce forum. Like this one.
Good luck =)

 

[edmondscommerce]

For your lower case issues, you should be able to put the following PHP at the top of your index.php file and it will rewrite everything with 301s to the lowercase variant.

$url = $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];
$pattern = '/([A-Z]+)/';

if(preg_match($pattern, $url)) {
    $new_url = strtolower($url);

    Header( 'HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently' );
    Header( 'Location: ' . $new_url );
    exit;
}

Bear in mind this could break anything that will ONLY work with upper case letters, they do exist I'm afraid so I would suggest you test this carefully on a dev site before applying to your live site.

 

[LianneF]

Just checked and I have a Yes for Use Web Server Rewrites

what I don't understand is if I type /shipping which is the correct url or say /Shipping /ShiPping or /sHiPping they all load the shipping page, how can that be?

would anyone be willing to have a look over my .htaccess file if I copy it in a text file and email over as I'm not really sure what any of it means apart from the 301's which I did.

Thanks
Lianne