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After enabling the Google sitemap.xml it seems that it doesn’t give the full urls (including categories). From what I read this seems to be the Magento default.

This causes big issues from an SEO point of view because it’s much better to include the full url with category, but also in that it creates duplicate content. For example in the sitemap.xml file it could link to this page: http://myshop.com/amazing-white.html where the correct url should be: http://myshop.com/mens-clothes/t-shirts/amazing-white.html But also the following page is possible: http://myshop.com/mens-clothes/amazing-white.html

All these pages show the same product!

I could add a canonical tag but this doesn’t really address the issue.

So… how do I get the sitemap.xml to show the full urls (with the categories), and how do I stop the other urls from showing (or preferably get them to redirect to the correct url)

Yoast’s great article on Magento SEO went some way to help, but it involves extensions and doesn’t answer the sitemap url issue.

John Conde
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iagdotme
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  • and a product can belong to many categorys and so on and why you think it's better to include full category url instead of only product pages ? – Anton S Oct 07 '11 at 20:26
  • Thanks for your reply. Having the category in the url is better for SEO. For example if the product is a hoodie called "Extreme Peterville" then http://myshop.com/mens-clothes/hoodies/extreme-peter.html is going to rank better for hoodies than http://myshop.com/extreme-peterville.html – iagdotme Oct 08 '11 at 08:14

1 Answers1

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Canonical URLS wont work, it was designed for dealing with parameter in the url.

In you case the best approach would be using PERMANENT REDIRECT (301) redirect.

So you decide which URL is the ultimate one and avoid duplicate content issue.

Hope can help. If you have more questions please comment :-)

GibboK
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  • quick question -- when permanent redirects are used in this way, one would modify the root .htaccess to add a rewrite condition and rule, correct? – grok_in_full May 21 '12 at 18:48