Google indexing

[przemko]

Hello,

I'd like to ask you to make a change/improvement, so jDownloads somehow better deal with Google indexing.
In my case the jDownloads component is linked in the main menu. Also there is a plugin used in some articles to embed the file download feature.

The problem is that when I access Google Search Console report, there are hundreds of duplicates reported.

Here is an example of duplicates which google sees exactly the same file duplicated three times:

• www.mysite.com/jDownloads-Menu-Item/finish/18-category-name/35-file-name
• www.mysite.com/jDownloads-Menu-Item/viewdownload/18-category-name/35-file-name
• www.mysite.com/jDownloads-Menu-Item/send/18-category-name/35-file-name

Can you please somehow unify this, so Google is not confused with duplicates?

[ColinM]

Hi
I presume you are using Google Analytics and the associated Search Report.  Is that correct.
The result s you are seeing are three different links so they are not the same link.  This is not a jD issuue but  the way Google Anaytics has been setup.
For example in principle there is a search for what has been viewd and what has been sent.
This is not a jD bug

[przemko]

Hi Colin,

No, it is not Google Analytics. It is Google Search Console:
https://search.google.com/search-console/

This is a place where you as an administrator of the service can see what is the result of google bot crawling your site.
Each entry in the report is a separate URL which google crawler stores during the indexing process.
Each URL is then classified as correct, duplicate, Error 404, etc.

The main functionality of Google Search Console is to show you how google sees all pages of your web site. Duplicates are reported as warning because a web site uses 2 or more different links to point to exactly the same content, what Google considers as a mistake. That impacts negatively the "quality" of your web site, causing it will be de-prioritized by google search engine when showing results.

And you are right. It is not a functional bug if we only think of JDownloads as a service to publish files. Unfortunately this feature of jDownloads should be corrected to work properly with google, so jDownload pages do not cause google score is negatively impacted.

[przemko]

Hello Colin,
Could you please let me know whether somebody will work on fixing these duplicated pages?
I found one more type of duplicated content, that is:
www.mysite.com/component/jdownloads/send/18-category-name/35-file-name

This means that for some reason jDownloads uses 4 different URLs to point to exactly the same file. Is there a way to reduce it to one URL per file?
Otherwise Google marks all of these as duplicates. I have over 100 files, so the report of duplicated urls contains 400 entries coming from jDownloads, what is equivalent to almost all positions in that report.

[ColinM]

Hi
We are presently working on the pending jD3.9 release.  It is very close to the Release Candidate stage.Part of the work in that is to use what Joomla! calls 'modern URL Routing' - that part is not yet working as it is proving a little complex but it will be done!  I think that work might sove your challenge.

We continuously try to improve jDownloads, and resolving a challenge like yours is part of our brief.
It would help to have some access to your site so I will send you a Private Message (PM).  We do not like unsolved challenges!!
From your reports I presume there are three menu items providing links to Downloads.
One of those links no doubt comes from the article link. That might be challenging to remove.Perhaps it might help if I explain that the part like .../send/ indicates what jD is to do with the download.

Best wishes

Colin

[przemko]

Hi Colin,

First and foremost: thanks for the tool itself. It really works great and I appreciate using it for more than 10 years already.

In terms of links in Menu - there are two. We will soon remove one as we will switch to different page layout/template.

Anyways, the issue which I claim is not related to links from menu, but to the fact that depending on how you access the component, the link contains "finish" or "viewdownload" or "send" part in the link. These three words are the only different parts of URL. That means jDownloads uses 3 different URLs to access exactly the same file.
Hope this helps understanding where the issue is.