Hi,

I've seen other posts on this but I'd like some clarification if anyone has a second.

I have the SEF friendly URLs and Use URL Rewriting turned on in Global Configuration.

I see people suggesting to "create a menu item" and it will fix it.

Can anyone please:

1. Explain why I'd want to create a menu item to junk up my menu structure?
2. Or, is it just a menu I'm not using that I'm to use?
3. Does anyone know the .htaccess code that can fix this?

Maybe it's just late, but I'm having a hard time understanding why this was made this way?

I just want to understand and fix it if anyone has a minute.

The site is http://www.theframeroom.com

Thanks,

Kory

Hi,

First of all, you should not modify your .htaccess file. It is not related at all with the "component/k2" thing.

When you are accessing a page in Joomla! the system needs somehow to know which component should load. That's why you see the "component/k2" in the URL.

A menu link to K2 categories contains already that information. The system detects that the URL you are trying to load is a menu link and it gets the component information from there.

You can create menu links in a menu that is not used in a module. This way your current menu structure will not change.

Thanks Lefteris.

Just for the record, part of the reason for my depth of questioning is I just found a lot of the other posts on this issue to be unclear so I wanted to help by broadening the conversation to be a complete answer.

That said, I create the menu, let's call it K2 content, to hold the items that aren't in my actual website navigation.

Do you know how this solution affects duplicate content issues on the K2 platform as well as canonical.

Of course, I am going to look into this, but again, I'm really trying to help others completely understand this issue as well.

Thanks again.

Kory



Thanks,

Kory

I don't get what you mean about duplicate content. Did you mean duplicate URLs?

Let's say that you have a menu with alias "sample" link pointing to index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=99 .

If you type in the browser address bar /sample or /index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=99 you will get the exact same page. This is how Joomla! works and this something that can be done with all components not just K2. That's the nature of Joomla! .

However this should not considered an issue as long as the duplicate URLs are not displayed in your page. Search engines like Google are crawling your site to find links. So if there are no duplicate URLs in your site you are fine.

The reason I ask is if you do site:theframeroom.com inurl:component you will see that these pages are indexed, but they are not linked anywhere from my site nav, in my pages, or on my sitemap at www.theframeroom.com/sitemap.xml.

It is also indexing other /component directories like just /component/weblinks and /compontent/content.

This is all duplicate content and there is no canonical to refer it to one page. Not good for SEO. I'm going to get a solution for canonical in place, but I'd like to see native K2 and Joomla handle duplicate content like this better in the future.

Thoughts?

Thanks again,

Kory

/component/component-name is the default URL when there is no menu item. In K2 and other components, mapping that content in a menu item will solve this issue.

Furthermore K2 offers advanced SEF settings in order to replace the /component/k2 in the URLs. However if you have mapped your content in menu items there is no need to use these settings. This is a either/or situation.