How to prevent the generation of multiple URLs for a product?

Hi,

If you have the canonical URL filled and you want to use it on all the listings, you can activate the "force canonical URLs on listings" setting in the HikaShop configuration.
However, it's normal that you can add stuff to a URL and it still works.
For example, take www.google.com/ ?
You can add whatever you want to it and it will still work and display the same thing: www.google.com/?test
And you'll find the same thing for Joomla articles and basically anywhere online as long as what you add to the URL is still valid according to the SEF rules of the website ( www.google.com/test wouldn't work for example ) etc.

Hi,

That's not what a canonical URL does. When you enter a canonical URL in a product, it adds the canonical head tag in the header of the product detail page. That way, regardless of which URL you use to access the product page, you're telling search engines that these are all the same page and to only index the canonical URL for all these URLs. That way, you won't get penalized, SEO-wise.

What the "Force canonical URLs on listings" setting does is that on products listings, instead of generating dynamically the URL of the product detail page, it will directly use the canonical URL. That way, your users will only see that canonical URL and will use it to access the product page.

So with both of these, you've convered all your bases:
- search engines will only index the canonical URL
- users will only see the canonical URL
So yes, you can still access the page with different URLs if you enter them directly in the address bar of your browser, and no, there is no automatic redirection to the canonical URL, but why does it matter to you ?

Hi,

Then, there is only two possible causes :
- the wrongly indexed URL was indexed before you entered the canonical URL for that product. It should sort itself out automatically after a while or you can request Google to reindex the URL.
- you have several canonical head tags on your product pages. The one added by HikaShop and a wrong one added by something else, and this messes with Google's indexing. 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. But the first thing would be to check the headers of a product detail page with the issue to check if you see several canonical tags or not.

Hi,

You need Google to recrawl the invalid URLs. The valid URL is already ok and Google won't know that the invalid URLs are the same as this URL until it reindex the invalid URLs and see the canonical URL tag pointing to the correct URL.

developers.google.com/search/docs/advanc...sk-google-to-recrawl