Before I continue with the test you suggest, could I remove the word NULL from the URL with JoomSEF without affecting anything in Joomla content, or virtuemart products and types?

If so then this would give me a temporary working around while I conduct the testing you've suggested outside of core hours of customer trade.

Cheers
Mark

Hi dajo

After disabling the SEF URL in Joomla Configuration the Cherry Picker drop downs work together fine and no NULL was added to the URL

Resulting URL Here:


Cheers
Mark

I'm sorry, I don't know what could cause this. We'll test the Cherry picker module and let you know.

Dajo

I think I may have figured out what's happened.

JoomSEF doesn't have the functionally to create keyphrases and our site uses keyphrasing to gain specific SERPs. When we switched from an old static html site to the new site using JoomSEF we found that we were losing positioning for a some of the orginal pages that have had 301 applied to them. Therefore, I exported the sefurls table as a CSV file to build custom keyphrases and descriptions.

Do we know if auto generation of keyphrases is going to be supported at any point soon?

When I imported the table back into the database using a third party DB Admin application, where ever the itemid column had NULL in the row the application set it to NULL (text) rather than a default DB value of NULL.

I've affected a couple of products, correcting them to test the results and they seem to be fine.

Due to JoomSEF automatically recording the URL's of Cherry Picker this has caused a mass of URL's 80,000 + and Google has indexed a good percentage of them, and identified duplication metadata for keywords, descriptions and titles. This has also had an adverse effect on some of our ranking.

The problem I face now is getting only the rows out of the database where the text value of the column is NULL. There around 24,000 rows altogether. I'm trying to get them out of the DB or update them to correct value but haven't found a good solution that doesn't overload the server.

Any ideas?

Cheers
Mark

Hi,
That's great that you've found the source of the problem.
You should be able to fix your database with one SQL query run from phpMyAdmin or similar tool, something like this (haven't tested it):

Of course backup your website before running it (eg. with Akeeba Backup).

Currently we don't plan on implementing automatic phrases generation for the keywords meta tag. Some extensions (like Virtuemart) already support simple keywords generation for some URLs, but in the short-term there probably won't be any more sophisticated functionality implemented.

Hi Dajo

The mysql query on sefurls>Itemid worked. I made a slight alteration to the query to ensure the query wasn't looking for fields set to NULL rather than text within the field having a value of NULL. Both your original query and the one below probably do the same thing:



Google is still reporting errors in webmaster tools but after reading the productforums over at Google the answer seems to be leave them and Google will eventually remove them from its list of urls for your site.

Regards
Mark