Hi,
The first part of SEF URL by default is the menu title, which is defined by the Itemid variable in URL (= ID of the menu item). So if you create menu items for VM categories, each menu item has its own ID in Joomla, so unless you manually set your own menu title for VM extension (Custom Menu Title option) or override the Itemid variable, each menu item will have its own title in the SEF URL.

Thanks for explaining what's happening; however this obviously means SEF URL needs a fix applied to it, because aliases should not use their own menu title for SEO purposes: aliases should go through to the same URL generated by the menu item they're aliased to.

Can you please let us know when this is going to be fixed? I have a client site that can't conscionably be launched with these reputation-damaging duplicate URLs.

Hi,
We'll check this problem and let you know.