Duplicated pages with odd URLs

Hi there,

I've got some pages that appear to be duplicated on my site with really odd URL's - I can't see the rationale in them or track down the duplicate in the back end.

For instance:

www.claycellar.co.uk/raw-materials/liqui...-sodium-dispex-500ml
www.claycellar.co.uk/tools/product/2439-sodium-dispex-500ml

This was something google webmaster pointed out to me. This product is stored in the raw materials/liquids category. I can't for the life of me figure out where theres another page under tools pointing to the same product. Theres a couple of other similar examples.

I'm using Joomla 2.5.14 and Hikashop 2.3.0.

Best wishes,

Jonathan

You have the product assigned to two categories?

Hi,

If Google tells you that there is a tools menu item with a link to that product, there must be one, or at least there was one before and Google didn't reindex the pages since then.
To avoid duplicates, the best is to enter the main URL of the product in the "Canonical URL" option of your products. That way, Google will know the know URL, will keep only this one and won't penalize your pages.

Hi Nicolas,

Thanks for this. Just to be clear: I was never doubting that the duplicate page exists/ed. It definately exists as you can click on both the above links and they take you to the same page. I was asking how to make sure that the duplicates don't exist. As far as I am aware the product is only assigned to a single category.

I didn't know about the canonical URL option. We will try this to see if it solves the problem.

Best wishes,

Jonathan

Hi Nicolas,

So we've have been through and added canonical urls. By my understanding, I would expect this to add a tag to the page with the rel field set to canonical. I ca't see this anywhere in the page source - should i be able to?

Best wishes,

Jonathan

Hi,

Yes you should see the canonical url in the page source. (Ctrl + U), then if you search for "canonical" you should see the meta tag (in the head part of the code).

If you don't have it, that's maybe because you had edited the view "product / show". In that view, you should see the code for the canonical meta tag, if you don't, thanks to reset the view (don't forget to save your modifications in an external view) and try again.