Duplicated pages with strange urls and other seo questions

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3 years 2 weeks ago #331505

-- HikaShop version -- : 4.4.1
-- Joomla version -- : Joomla! 3.9.23 Stable

Hello,
I'm working on SEO side of my site. Looking at Search Console results I've found a lot of pages that have been correctly excluded by Google from indexing.But the number is keep growing day after day, so I was trying to understand what I'm doing wrong and if it's a normal behavior of Hikashop.
I've different reasons related to the excluded pages, so let's start with the first, hoping it helps with the others too:
Duplicate page, Google has chosen a different canonical page from the one specified by the user (624 pages)
Looking at the urls the main problem is that this kind of URLs are working:
www.zoesseeds.com/it/semi/autofiorenti/amnesia-og-auto/ product/listing?limitstart=0&limit=21
I've made some test and if I put /product at the end of every page of the site (contact too, for example) it opens a listing page with all the products that I've uploaded in the shop. Same if I put /produt/listing.

Searching on forum I've found that sometimes this thing is related to the content modules. So on my local environment I've disabled all the content modules and the carousels too, but if I write /product at the end of the url it still displays the listng results.
- All my modules/carousels have a specific menu item selected in the menu drop down option.
- Carousel are loaded only in the home page, while the content modules are displayed on every product page as list inside an accordion, like a menu beside the related products module, which has his menu item specified.
- Sef config is set to force canonical.
- All the pages in the Italian version of the site have the canonical url defined, using falang pop up; not in the general product page (is this correct? Or should I write a canonical url in the general product view too?)
They lack in the french and English version, cause of I was testing them on Italian version before replicate them on the others.

What am I doing wrong? Before start working hard on my keywords and ranking I would like to clear this things.

Thanks a lot!
Davide

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3 years 2 weeks ago #331508

Hi,

The fact that you can add extra elements to the URLs and it still displays a valid page is normal. That comes from the way Joomla SEF routing is done. No problem there. And having a canonical URL for each language is good. And no problem not having it in the main information of the products.
I do see a problem however. On the page www.zoesseeds.com/it/semi/autofiorenti/a...imitstart=0&limit=21 , if you look at the HTML headers of the page, you can see that you have that same URL as canonical URL of the page:
i.imgur.com/RXtW2yC.png
That's wrong because that means that if I add another parameter to the URL the canonical header tag will get that extra parameter.
But the point of a canonical header tag is to tell the search engine which URL to use when different URLs display the same content.
That also means that it is not HikaShop adding that canonical header tag since HikaShop would add the canonical URL you would have specified in the canonical URL field of the category (or the translation) and thus it would be the same canonical URL regardless of the extra parameters.
What this indicates is that you have something else on your website generating these wrong canonical meta tags and that's why google tells you that it ignored the canonical URL specified as it's a wrong one.
From experience, I know that this can happen with the SEF system plugin of Joomla. So if you have it activated, try turning it off. Instead, I would recommend using a third party canonical URL component dedicated to that purpose. It will allow you to have a fine grained handling of canonical URLs and help your SEO endeavours.

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3 years 2 weeks ago #331545

Hi
thank you for the answer.
For now I've cleared the Site domain Url in the System - SEF plugin; doing so I'm not seeing the rel="canonical" attached to the site urls, except for hikashop pages, meanwhile I'm looking for a new plugin that doesn't mess the Hikashop canonical config.
If I turn it off completely I lost many images (I've seen a post on forum about that during search)
Anyway, this could be just a temporary solution as we're building a blog too and we'll need to have canonical urls enabled for the articles.
Now my question is: where does all these links spotted by google came from? Links like this:
www.zoesseeds.com/it/contatti/product/li...start-21/;;;limit-21
Are they generated by some wrong configurations in Hikashop Content Modules?

Thanks

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3 years 2 weeks ago #331546

BTW. adding the .htaccess rule explained in this post seems to avoid at least to see wrong listing pages
www.hikashop.com/forum/integrations/8751...hikashop.html#195240
But the original question is still valid ;) Where do these links came from?

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3 years 2 weeks ago #331547

Hi,

I don't know. Does google display more information on these URLs ?
Like for example the "referer" ? That's an important piece of information as the referer gives you the URL of the page where the link was found. Once that is known, you can look in the HTML of the referer URL page and search for that faulty URL to understand what is generating it and from there understand what's going on and deal with it.
Also, the access log of your web server should also contain the referer URL for each URL. So that could be worth checking if you don't find it on your google manager.

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3 years 2 weeks ago #331564

Hello again
So, following your advice:
www.zoesseeds.com/it/component/hikashop/...mitstart=21&limit=21
is asked by
www.zoesseeds.com/it/component/hikashop/product/listing
which is called by
www.zoesseeds.com/index.php/it/

On the home page the only links that call /component/hikashop is the add to cart buttons of the carousel
www.zoesseeds.com/it/component/hikashop/...atecart/add-1/cid-27
-- Something similar to the only one person on the crime scene :D
Any suggestion?

PS:
Today I have also trashed all the hikashop content modules, displayed as lists, that I was using like simple menus, even in the footer, so basically on every page; instead I'm using Joomla menu modules.
Calling those links above give me an error 500 as the listing_seed_card (a personal override of default listing) isn't found anymore.
But there are still plenty to investigate.

Thanks Nicolas.

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3 years 2 weeks ago #331581

Hi,

Well, the fact that /component/hikashop/product/listing?limitstart=21&limit=21comes from /component/hikashop/product/listing is quite normal. That's just the URL of the second page of the products listing. So that just means that /component/hikashop/product/listing was a listing of products with more than one page.
Regarding how the link /component/hikashop/product/listing was generated, it could be because you didn't had any products listing menu item configured, and you didn't had anything entered in the "URL where you will be redirected when the cart is empty" setting, but you had a menu item / link to access your checkout on the homepage. So when the cart would be empty, the link to the checkout redirects to the URL configured in the "URL where you will be redirected when the cart is empty" setting. But if you didn't configure anything in it, the system will generate a products listing URL, and if it can't find any menu item it can use for it, it will use /component/hikashop/product/listing as that's the only thing left it can generate to display a listing of the products.
Now that's just a supposition. And since you have changed things on your website since then, I can't say for sure.
Still I would recommend you review the "URL where you will be redirected when the cart is empty" setting so that you enter in it the main URL of your shop on your website where you want the customers to be directed to when their cart is empty and they try to access it.

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3 years 2 weeks ago #331589

Hi Nicolas
1. /component/hikashop/product/listing?limitstart=21&limit=21 - understood; I don't have any listing page with pagination so it must come from somewhere else, as you suggest.

2. Empty cart URL - correct: this value was empty; now it redirect to the top category of the shop (the seeds page)
I don't have visible cart link on page, it's a link that calls a modal pop up, but the cart menu item is in the sitemap, so probably Goole hits that link (I suppose)
How does the redirect empty cart URL works with multilanguage? It should automatically redirect to the french/italian/english seeds page?
I'm using Falang.

3.Checking the urls I've found some other problems, related with "alternate"...this is the head in the english version
<link rel="alternate" href=" www.zoesseeds.com/fr/seeds/category/graines " hreflang="fr">
<link rel="alternate" href=" www.zoesseeds.com/it/seeds/category/semi " hreflang="it">
<link rel="alternate" href=" www.zoesseeds.com/it/seeds/category/semi " hreflang="x-default">
<link rel="alternate" href=" www.zoesseeds.com/en/seeds/category/seeds " hreflang="en">
Italian version
<link rel="alternate" href=" www.zoesseeds.com/it/semi/category/semi " hreflang="it">
and so on...of course it's a 404 page.
If I move to the english contact page, for example, and I click on the italian flag to change the language I get this:
www.zoesseeds.com/it/contacts/product/contact
All the pages, except for the home, don't have a correct alternate link.
As said I have Hika SEF config to use the specified canonical URL and Joomla SEF plugin turned on but without a specific domain (just to see the images).

I'm not going to touch the config parameters until your answer; just check and correct the canonical urls in the english and french version of Hika products.

Thank you!!
Davide

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3 years 2 weeks ago #331590

Hi,

2. If you have a multilingual website, then you want to enter a new translation key in the "URL where you will be redirected when the cart is empty" setting, and then add that translation key as a translation override:
www.hikashop.com/download/languages.html#modify
So for example, you would enter in the option the text: MY_EMPTY_CART_URL
And then, in each language override, you would add the line:
MY_EMPTY_CART_URL="xxx"
where xxx is to be replaced by the URL you want for the current language file.

3. The alternate meta tags don't come from HikaShop. I suppose they must be added by Falang, but I don't know how it generates them. I would recommend to check with Falang's support and see if these are generated by Falang. If so, then they can surely have a look at the situation and provide a solution.

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3 years 2 weeks ago #331603

Hey

2. yep!! I should already know that!! :D

3. I was showing the alternate as these are also the links that appears on hikashop pages when I click on falang flags.
Note that these strange urls seem to be related only with hikashop menu items, cause privacy policy, disclaimers and the blog pages too are not affected by this behavior. Registration and contacts are both hikashop menu items. On my local machine I moved back to 4.4.0 to look if the issue could be related with the new hika version, but it''s still there.
Now I'm gonna put the current version back on local and update the falang basic component there (we have pro on live site). I'll report you the result.

Thanks!
Davide

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3 years 2 weeks ago #331605

Quick update
Hikashop 4.3.0 ok
Hikashop 4.4.0 ok
Hikashop 4.4.1 broken falang links
Tomorrow I'll continue the investigation

Cya
Davide

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3 years 2 weeks ago #331615

SDANG!
Update the falang component solved the alternate link issue.

About the original topic: checking on google search console the live URL (not the ones that have been already crawled) seems that .../product/lising pages now show the correct canonical url. So I'm quite optimistic we have solved, at least, part of the excluded pages. Need to investigate more in the next days.

On local I'm testing the Custom Canonical Plugin ( extensions.joomla.org/extension/custom-canonical/ )
Do you know it? Limiting its use to just articles and joomla categories, without touching the default canonical, seems to work well with Hika,

So, for the moment I'm ok, I'll be back here if new question about SEO will arise in the next days.
Thank you very much Nicolas, your tips are always very useful!

Have a nice day.
Davide

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3 years 2 weeks ago #331622

Hi,

I haven't had to use that extension yet.
But yes, being able to exclude HikaShop from it is great since HikaShop can already manage its canonical URLs itself.

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