I have inherited a Joomla/VirtueMart site from a developer. Although I have a pretty good handle on Joomla, I've never worked with VM before. So at this point I'm a bit lost as I try to get SEO working with this site by using JoomSEF & the VirtueMart extension.

The only settings that I've changed are the order of the site title and the divider symbol, and turning on the use of numbers for duplicate URLs. Other info about the site:
Joomla 1.5x
VirtueMart 1.1.7
Template: rt_zephyr_j15 1.5.1 by RocketTheme

Here are the mysteries that I'm trying to figure out:
1. JoomSEF generated almost 3100 URL for this site. This is at least twice the number of items I expected. Many of the URLs are in the format of category/cart, category/account, category/register, and category/.../ask.
I also have URLs in the format of subcategory/category/subcategory/item.

2. Many of the URLs have associated products with the wrong category. For example, JoomSEF created the URL mna-publications/bookstore/mna-publications/gold-sun-face-pendant for an item that should be jewelry/rings-pendants/gold-sun-face-pendant.

So I'm trying to make sense of just what trail JoomSEF is following to build these URLs. I'm guessing that the subcategory/category/subcategory thing is a switch in the JoomSEF configuration that I have not yet found. I've thoroughly read through the documentation, but just don't have a sense of what to look for.

Thanks in advance for your help!

Hi,

The very first part of the URL is the Menu title. You can disable adding this part to URLs for each component separately using Manage Extensions page in JoomSEF. There you open parameters for each component and there on the Common tab disable the "Show Menu Title" option.

If you use menu items for each category in VirtueMart, then each category has its own Itemid (which is ID of the menu item). This very often causes duplicates to be created, so it's good idea to select one menu item as main for VirtueMart, find its ID in Menu Manager, and then open VirtueMart extension parameters from Manage Extensions page in JoomSEF and on the Common tab set "Itemid handling" to "Override" and "Override Itemid" to the menu item ID.

The .../ask URLs are created by VirtueMart, they are the links to "Ask for product pricing" feature in VM.

After making any changes in configuration of JoomSEF, make sure you delete the already created SEF URLs using Manage SEF URLs page and clear Joomla and JoomSEF caches, so the URLs can be recreated.

Thanks, dajo. That is very helpful.

Ernie