Google products plugin url

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5 years 10 months ago #302031

-- HikaShop version -- : 4.0.1
-- Joomla version -- : 3.9.1

Hello, I'm having a few issues with google merchant not liking my products xml file. I'm on the latest Hikashop version and I've just reloaded my products.xml from the plugin. The main issue I'm having is that my robots.txt is blocking about 60% of the URLs, I think due to this line;
Disallow: /components/
however I've been advised to keep this in to help prevent googlebots crawling certain parts of the site. This is what it is complaining about;
domain.com/index.php?option=com_hikashop&ctrl=product&task=show&cid=1673&name=xyz
whereas my SEF urls look like this ...
domain.com/sound/wireless-music/xyz
I don't understand why it's allowing some of the products through but rejecting others?
Here is my plugin config.

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Last edit: 5 years 10 months ago by serbofleconcepts.

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5 years 10 months ago #302042

Hi,

I don't understand the problem. What is the exact error message you get from Google Products for refusing the indexing of these products ?

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5 years 10 months ago #302068

Thanks for the reply, it's not indexing them because my robots.txt file is blocking them - the link it's sending google is in the format;
https://mydomain.com/index.php?option=com_hikashop&ctrl=product&task=show&cid=1720&name=sony-ubp-x800-4k-uhd-blu-ray-player



Now I would understand if it blocked all my products but it's not? Can we not use the SEF url for google products to produce clean links for google?

Thanks

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5 years 10 months ago #302071

Hi,

The SEF URL is generated dynamically on each listing based on the current menu item, the category that was used to access the listing of the products, etc.
When the Google Products plugin generates the URL, it's either from the backend or via the cron task. In both case, there is no "current menu item" and thus no way to generate consistently the same URL that you have on the listings of your website.
The solution is to properly fill the "canonical URL" field of your products with the URL that is commonly used to access the product page (and that you want to be used) on your product listings.
That way, the Google Products plugin will use the canonical URL.
That will have the added benefit of avoiding duplicate content issues with your product pages so it could even improve your SEO.

Finally, disabling the components folder in your robots.txt is not what prevents Google from using the link mydomain.com/index.php?option=com_hikash...k-uhd-blu-ray-player
So it must be another rule of your robots.txt
Looking at the robots.txt file on your website, I think it is these rules:

Disallow: /*?
Disallow: /*=

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5 years 10 months ago #302322

Thank you for your detailed reply Nicholas.

Is there a quick way to populate all the canonical URLs, maybe via phpadmin?

Thanks

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5 years 10 months ago #302326

deleted duplicate content

Last edit: 5 years 10 months ago by serbofleconcepts.

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5 years 10 months ago #302330

Hi,

Via phmyadmin or a mass action it might be possible based on the structure of the menu items on your website, but it might be impossible.
However, it would be simpler to just set the "Force canonical URLs on listings" to ""Use canonical URL and generate it if missing"" in the HikaShop configuration. Then, you can just browse your website listings of products and it will generate the URLs automatically each time a link to a product page is displayed on a listing and the canonical URL isn't there yet.

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