Re: google sitemap / index issue - [SOLVED]

Hi,

I wonder if someone can advise me on what is happening on my site:

I have isnstalled UKSB's Google sitemap generator - this is itself working fine. The sitemap is generating links such as

http://www.mydomain.co.uk/my-item-test.html - when you visit this link the canonical link in the source is the same

This link is correct as per the seo keywords i am using for my seo URL in the product admin.

How ever in google webmaster tools it is telling me that the i only have 42 of 300 + urls indexed from the site map.

Upon taking a look into this I do have URL's indexed in google for my products, but as google is manually crawling my site to find them, it is including the category(s) within the link ie

http://www.mydomain.co.uk/maincat/subca ... -test.html - the canonical url in the source code reflects this also.

As i see it if/when google finds the "direct link" it may also index this. I will then get duplicate meta tag warnings etc.

I personally like the category structure within the url for both SEO purposes, and I feel in the same way the breadcrumb works it helps customers understand what/where they are looking at better.

As I see it I have 2 options :

Set canonical tag somehow to the "basic" URL (as per current sitemap link) - thus losing the category structure from within the URL

or

(Simon) - is it possible to ammend the code in the sitemap generator code to include the full category path to the item? - (prefered)

I would welcome any advice or opinion on this as I realize there may be many workarounds and or solutions,

Many thanks,

Anthony

edit,

I forgot I was using a vqmod that was modifying the canonical url to include the category path (as opposed to without)

For the time being I have removed this to allow the sitemap to work reflect the urls that google will index me on.

If it is viable/possible to get the sitemap to include the category path then I think i would prefer this as mentioned in my first post.

For now though this should sort things out,

regards,

anthony

Hi Yubnub,

The extension was updated last night.

For the sitemaps and the Google Merchant feeds, you can now set it to use full path's for products with category links, plus a lot more options for the sitemaps themselves.

Do not reinstall the category canonical vqmod though, because that is also taken care of in the updated extension.

Also in the update we have added Google Adwords Attributes which allow you to link your products to Google Adwords Ads

hi simon,

Many many thanks for this,

I have just carried out the update and it is working perfectly,

many thanks again for your support and hard work,

best regards

Youre welcome