Friendly Urls and the battle with Webmaster Tools!

[jimicus]

Hello All

 

I have prestashop version 1.5.4.1. Very new user of prestashop, learning as I go along but have hit a wall!

 

My site was installed in a sub directory so it read as www.lindsaysweets.co.uk/prestashop/en. I moved all the folders so that it now reads www.lindsaysweets.co.uk.

 

Problem 1.

 

I see that on Webmaster tools i have 277 error 404 pages all with www.lindsaysweets.co.uk/prestashop/en at the beginning. As far as im concerned these pages dont exist anymore. How can i get rid of them? At worst how do I redirect them to the new page.

 

Problem 2.

 

I see that I have 100's of pages with duplicate meta titles and descriptions all starting with www.lindsaysweets.co.uk/prestashop/en. Again, these pages dont exist anymore. How can I get google not to crawl these pages?

 

Can anyone help?

[Mr S]

edit file .htaccess add this line before # ~~start~~

 

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine on

RewriteRule ^prestashop/(.*)$ /$1 [L,R=301]
</IfModule>

# ~~start~~ Do not remove this comment, Prestashop will keep automatically the code outside this comment when .htaccess will be generated again
# .htaccess automaticaly generated by PrestaShop e-commerce open-source solution
# http://www.prestashop.com - http://www.prestashop.com/forums

This will 301 redirect any URL requests starting with /prestashop/ to the root

Edited November 18, 2013 by HA!*!*Y (see edit history)

[Mr S]

 

And all you can do about google is wait for it to recrawl the pages and see they have been moved.

[jimicus]

Thankyou for your reply.

 

I have inserted the code where you have suggested, but I am still getting 404's when I click on the URL's. These use are prestashop/gb and prestashop/en. So should I have a code for these as well, or should the prestashop part worked for these too?

[jimicus]

Hello All

 

Ok the fix that HA!*!*Y provided didn't work, but I played around with the .htaccess code, (Making backups!!) and entered the following, mindful that it wipes if I regenerate htaccess, hence the back ups !

 

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.lindsaysweets.co.uk$
RewriteRule ^en/(.*)$ /$1 [L,R=301]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.lindsaysweets.co.uk$
RewriteRule ^gb/(.*)$ /$1 [L,R=301]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.lindsaysweets.co.uk$
RewriteRule ^prestashop/(.*)$ /$1 [L,R=301]

 

This seems to work and since webmaster tools crawled the site last both duplicate meta descriptions and meta titles have gone down from 158 to 97. So hopefully in a few weeks they may go down to zero!!!

[Mr S]

@jimicus

 

I updated my post #2 code it should now work.

 

Also code would not get wiped if you regenerate htaccess

Edited November 18, 2013 by HA!*!*Y (see edit history)

[jimicus]

Hi HA!*!Y

 

That seems to work well except I have a new problem!

 

I recently changed the URLS' of the catergories from,

 

Wedding-sweets/products

 

to

 

Wedding-sweets-in-3kg-1kg-and-250g-bags/product

 

And webmaster is seeing these two pages as duplicates, even though they direct to the same page.

 

I did have en/ language installed of which I didn't change the url, so maybe that's what caused it, it is seeing the en/page and the gb/page.

 

Either way I have deleted the en/ language and regenerated .htaccess. Next time webmaster crawls im hoping this will solve it.

 

What do people think?