AbleCommerce Generates Multiple URLs for the Same Product

[nandryshak]

Hi all,

Recently we noticed that AbleCommerce is generating multiple URLs that all link to the same product. URLs like

http://www.domain.com/Procuct-Name-P100.aspx
http://www.domain.com/Product-Name-P100C111.aspx
http://www.domain.com/Procuct-Name-P100C222.aspx

All link to the same product. Category pages display links ending in P###C###.aspx, yet I see that the products have rel="canonical" tags linking to the page ending in P###.aspx.

Isn't this an SEO issue? Optimally, there should be only one URL for each product, correct? Should we take the time to remedy this?

Thanks.

[Katie]

First, this is not a problem because canonical URLs (indexed by the search engines) are always the same.

Secondly, both URLs with and without category are possible and valid. There are some use-cases where these are needed. For example when a product is in more than one category, and a customer is browsing the categories on the retail side, we can show 'bread crumbs'. Now depending on where the customer is coming from, the bread crumb for a product may vary because product belongs to more than one categories. In such cases category Id in URL is used for identification.

However, in most recent versions of AC Gold we have even eliminated this, and we make sure that we do not use the URL generation method that adds category ID to the URL. It is possible to eliminate the category ID from URLs by manually update all the code where URLs are being generated the old way.