When I click any link from the k2 tools tag cloud module the urls all have stuff like this:

itemlist/tag/DIOR%20MYLADYDIOR6/S%20%20Dior%20Sunglasses

mostly the %20 stuff... but I see some other funny stuff also.... am I incorrect in thinking this will be resolved if I just buy sh404sef?

---

Note: I do have duplicate urls in my sitemap for k2 also....

one set with the component/k2/item/number-itemTitle

and another set with /category/number-itemTitle

Peter wrote: Hey has the duplicate url issue discussed in the fist post (7 months ago) been resolved, because if it hasn't why is Admin telling us to get sh404sef ?

I have been building my site for months now using K2 and today - when I almost finished - to my surprise I realized that K2 has been building a lot of duplicated URLs. The guys over at anything-digital said that it's a K2 issue and not a sh404SEF issue, which is cleary true.

First the damn tags are producing a duplicated URL every time an article has been posted with already an existend tag. This describes it pretty well.

This issue is not new to K2, related threads has been posted in the past with not so useful solutions.

It seems to me sh404sef developers blame k2, who blame Joomla in the meantime nothing changes, it seems the ball is squarely in k2's court, why not get together with anythingdigital to make & sell a plugin that works gets rid of this duplicate content problem once & for all instead of passing the buck.. The way i see it it's in every bodies best interest to get this sorted.

Peter I 100% agree! I'm still waiting on a solution to this issue.

bye bye

Lefteris, this issue is more than a year old and you still pretend that those duplicated URLs are not K2's fault despite someone just proved that those issues can be resolved by a hack?

You really thought that people would make menu items for each tag? Are you admitting that K2's SEO is bad without an SEO extension?

@Matt, i think K2 team gets kickback from anythingdigital purchases of sh404sef. that's the cause why the bug is to get away only with payed extension and no answers from the K2 team. K2 team knows like each other K2 user , that K2 without sh404sef is not usable on production sites, cause of duplicated urls issue. I mean K2 team doesn't want to repair this bug - they get money for the bugs existense.

btw: the advice to use menupoints for each category doesn't work.

Yeah, making menu items for each tag is ridiculous.

weird, my hack was first added to tips and tricks, and then quickly removed from...

The main things is well done - we have a hack to avoid the issue and can use K2 on production sites and money/Google critical projects - thank you for publishing! It was my fail to edit article after publishing.

The thing, which makes me still wondering, is, that only my idotic comments has moved you to answer in a thread, which exists since a year and more than 5000 K2 users are waiting for K2 teams reaction. I'm a K2-newbie and my first touch with K2 was this issue, which was unrepaired and not answered. You must not wonder and not be offended, if in such thread idiotic comments are coming up - it is your forum and you have all possibilities at any time to answer. But you haven't till now. And if there is no answer, so i may think you get kickbacks from anithingdigital, from god, from devil, from bin laden ;)

K2 is crazy good component, but a bug is a bug, and 5000 users, which are waiting for you, may become impatient with time. And they have all reason for impatience.

Since the hack is in the tips and tricks i would suggest you close this thread which makes newbies confused.

Please don't be offended - i haven't intended so. But please take serious such threads, even if you can't answer something, just communicate it, say, you will answer after you go deeper into issue, something to let us know, you are with us, and if a problem is serious for us, so please take it equally serious.

all the best from Berlin
Evgenij

I was the one who wrote this review: extensions.joomla.org/extensions/authoring-a-content/content-construction/8061#rev-135014

Since I can't respond in this review directly, I will do it here.

What you fail to understand is that K2 simply follows the Joomla! framework guidelines when it comes to URLs. For example, take this URL from a recent Joomla! announcement on joomla.org (it's the core Joomla! article system):

The URL is www.joomla.org/announcements/release-news/5471-joomla-3-0-2-released.html

But one can easily do this too:
www.joomla.org/announcements/release-news/5471-joomla-3-0-2-released-wow-some-extra-stuff-on-the-URL

Both URLs will render the same page of course. Now, this is not a bad thing SEO wise. SEO - which you fail to understand obviously - is not related in any way to how one or more users can manipulate a site's URLs. This is stupid if you think about it... SEO is about ordering/organizing a site's content so that search engines can pick up that content easily. The easiest the better for a site.

Dear lefteris, fotis or whoever replied to my review, yes I am very well aware that K2 uses Joomla's guidelines to build URLs, but what YOU fail to realize is that the issue isn't the possibility to add some stuff to any URL without getting a 404 error, it's K2's behaviour to build URLs, which depend on what page they are created, that all point to the exact same content.

Have you installed sh404sef and saw how many duplicated URLs you have? Your database will be bloated with thousands of duplicated URLs and this can't be good. Why is it so difficult to make for every item one unique URL?

Another huge problem are tags. Tags aren't assigned to menu items (and no, nobody in their right mind would create 2000 menu items for their 2000 tags), so depending on what page you currently are, you always get a different URL to the same tag. And I'm not speaking about the complex non-SEF urls, but about the SEF urls of Joomla's native component.

For examlple, on your frontpage you have articles with many tags. The URLs of those tags are as follows:

domain.com/component/k2/itemlist/tag/example

Now if you go to article view you would get a URL to the exact same tag as follows:

domain.com/category/subcategory/itemlist/tag/example

If you go one category up you would get this:

domain.com/category/itemlist/tag/example

And these are not made up, they are real URLs and of course google will pick them up and categorize them as duplicated URLs.

Don't you see this issue? Is it Joomla's fault? Do we have to install a SEO component? Then why doesn't Flexicontent have this issue? Why does the K2 hack from above resolve this issue and why couldn't you submit this hack? Answer this question please and don't ignore it like you did in the review.

Oh and just because Joomla's native SEO is useless for production sites doesn't mean that every component should use the same guidelines for building URLs.

Anyone can read the URL you posted back to the K2 Community, but sorry, I'm not admitting anything.

Of course you did. You implied it by saying we should either install a SEO extension or create dozen of menu items.

As for the other claims...
a) "other extensions offer better URLs": if they are native extensions, no they don't

You mean flexicontent? If flexicontet creates unique URLs for each tag and K2 not, then certainly their URLs are better.

b) "K2 support is bad": define bad support for a free extension first. We're not elitists. If we were, we wouldn't have released K2, better yet, we wouldn't have launched a community.

Bad support is when people create threads asking for help to resolve issues that are ignored by the devs for years. Just have a look in your own forum. So many unresolved threads and you still claim in an reply to a review that the community is very active? Yes, they are active in asking questions, which remain unresolved.

Regardless if your extension is free or not, if you make a product and offer it to endconsumers you should support them. Look at other communities and other FREE extensions, there are hundreds of them and are supported by the devs that don't earn a single penny off of it. If you are not ready to provide FREE support for a FREE product, then you should have made K2 commercial in the first place or just don't release it at all.

You might wanna look for some other CMS perhaps. I strongly suggest Google's Blogger cause a) it's built by Google (= "beautiful" SEO for the paranoid ones) and b) it's free like K2.

Give us a break will ya?

What I and I think everyone who read your replies to K2 reviews noticed is that you have a very strong attitude. It's like you lash out on everybody who criticizes K2, whether it's justified or not. Perhaps you think because K2 is free, it's ok to do that.

Finally just a heads-up regarding other SEO matters in K2. You claim K2's SEO is excellent and yet I had to rework the whole K2 template to make it more search engine friendly. For instance you are using wrong heading tags for article titles in blog/category view. Both articles and sidebar content use h3 tags. This means that you degrade K2 articles to sidebar content. But yeah, keep pretending K2's SEO is excellent.

@Matt: free means developers must nothing do. They can, but must not. Just the same the community: can help, must not. The user can use free product, but only like it is, without waiting for anything from anybody. There are 3 possibilities: 1. you use it and can code - win, 2. you use it and can't code - if troubles, you must find somebody, who can code and pay for support or fail, 3. you don't use it, but other, payed extention with included support. All other possibilities are not clear, cause you can only hope, that all works or something helps. If your project must earn money, i would not advice to use K2 without good to know, what to do, if something doesn't work like expected.

Chilly,

I tried inserting your hack but nothing changed. I'm not very good at this type of thing. Is there somewhere specific within the category item php file where I should insert the hack? Thanks for the help. This entire thing is extremely frustrating with the duplicate links.

chilly_bang wrote: Hi all!

Here the hack to avoid duplicated URLs

For an item:
take the file: components/com_k2/templates/default/item.php from your K2 template. Add

<?php 
if ($this->item->link!= JRequest::getURI()) JApplication::redirect($this->item->link,'','' ,true); 
?>

For a category:
take the file
components/com_k2/templates/default/category_item.php from your K2 template. Add

<?php
$this->original_link = JRoute::_(K2HelperRoute::getCategoryRoute(JRequest::getVar('id'), 
0)); 
if (JRequest::getInt('start') > 0) $this->original_link .= "?start=" . JRequest::getVar('start'); 
$this->real_link = JRequest::getURI(); 
if ($this->original_link != $this->real_link) JApplication::redirect($this->original_link,'','' ,true);
?>

The hack will redirect all duplicated urls to the single right one.

Use at your own risc and remember:
with this hack no parameter can be pushed with any url. Your print pages etc will not work anymore (print page will be loaded WITH template).

I couldn't use multiple categories in menu. Returned a 404 error, so I had to remove the categories hack at least..

Hello Yiannis K,

The hack to avoid duplicated URLs from Chilly_bang is working but I still have the item id number in the link.
Is there someone who knows how to remove the item id from the link.
I have for example: http://www.yoursite,com/item/16-joomla-k2-problem-item-id.html but I want it like this http://www.yoursite,com/item/joomla-k2-problem-item-id.html without the item id number.
Please can someone help me?!

Greetings Mike

Hello everybody,

New k2 update and the SEO problem is fixed!!
Everthing works great! Good work k2! :-)

Greetings Mike

Mike wrote: Hello everybody,

New k2 update and the SEO problem is fixed!!
Everthing works great! Good work k2! :-)

Greetings Mike

Could you please mention the version of k2, because i have same issues with the version 2.6.3

Hi Ganesamoorthy,

K2 v2.6.5 but I still have the SEO problem. So I put the fix back in the item.php

Greetings Mike

Hi Mike,

I have been looking into this issue myself and even went down the route of employing someone in htaccess coding skills to rewrite the URL.

After spending too many hours on this I now have it working.

1. Back up your site using Akeeba Backup
2. Download the latest version of K2 which is currently K2_v2.6.5.zip.
3. Remember, if you have made any changes to the K2 CSS files without creating an override they will be written over. So keep any necessary files.
4. Install K2_v2.6.5.zip via Extensions Manager
5. Now go to Components / K2
6. Click the Parameters button top right
7. A window opens up - click the Advanced tab
8. Scroll down to Advanced SEF Settings
9. Enable advanced SEF for K2 URL's - Yes
10. Use the item ID in the URL - No

[img size=74kb]www.pixelfire.com.au/images/k2-sef-settings.png[/img]

Save and close.

These settings have worked for me. I wish I had only upgraded my K2 before spending too many bloody hours on this issue. Oh well - it's working fine now and it's great.

Don't forget, if you have a few Items that people access through a category listing you will need to update the redirects for their URL's which I now need to do so I'll have to disable the new SEF until I have a full list of redirects I need to set up.

Example URL change:
www.pixelfire.com.au/website-and-graphic-design-blog/item/121-top-10-joomla-extensions

Now becomes:
www.pixelfire.com.au/website-and-graphic-design-blog/top-10-joomla-extensions

Also this guy at the bottom of this URL has some good ideas for avoiding duplication of URL using the No Numbers Sourcerer and the rel="canonical" tag. It's worth a look.
forum.joomla.org/viewtopic.php?t=624631

Hope that helps.

Cheers,
Neil.

I have written an in depth article on how to address the URL issue as well as avoiding any duplication of content. Please see my link:

www.pixelfire.com.au/website-and-graphic-design-blog/item/122-how-to-remove-item-and-item-id-from-a-k2-url

I hope this helps all of you :)

Good luck.

Hi,

How can remove component/k2/ from my URL

For example:
www.domain.de/component/k2/article

to

www.domain.de/article


Thank you for your help :-)