Virtuemart SEO 1 – Beware of the Modules

Every day this week we’re providing tips and tricks to help you improve the Search Engine Optimization of your Virtuemart shopping cart.

Tip 1:  Beware of Virtuemart’s Modules

We’ve talked often before about Duplicate Content and how it can cause searchbots to crawl your site less effectively. There are some major potential culprit in Virtuemart … the modules.

Example URLs

We’re going to use the demo on the Virtuemart site as an example and in particular the Power Sander. Here are three different URLs you can use to get to the same page: 

Going through the cart:

http://demo.virtuemart.net/?page=shop.product_details&flypage=flypage.tpl&product_id=10&category_id=2&option=com_virtuemart

Latest Products Module:

http://demo.virtuemart.net/?page=shop.product_details&category_id=2&flypage=flypage.tpl&product_id=10&option=com_virtuemart

Last Viewed Option on Flypage:

http://demo.virtuemart.net/?page=shop.product_details&product_id=10&category_id=2&flypage=flypage.tpl&option=com_virtuemart

What’s Causing This Problem?

Very simply, each module has the same information but in a different order.

Going through the cart:

Layout / Product ID / Category ID

Latest Products Module:

Category ID / Layout / Product ID

Last Viewed Option on Flypage:

Product ID / Category ID / Layout

Whats the Solution?

Simply test the modules that you’re using on the site. Some such as Top Ten Products work fine and won’t cause you any problems. Other modules will need to be dealt with more carefully.  The best way to do that is by using a combination of robots.txt and Search Engine Friendly URLs. Coincidentally, that will be tomorrow’s topic as we take you through the best options for setting up SEF URLs on your Virtuemart site.