Magento Core_URL_Rewrite Problems

[csworkwear]

Hi Everyone,

We are currently caught between a rock and a hard place with Magento and are wondering if anyone else had similar problems and could share their advice.

Our Core_URL_Rewrite now containt 1.3 million records for an account that has 12000 products on 4 different store views. This has ballooned past the point that we are no longer able to reindex our URL Management.

The option that is being suggested to us is to truncate the table and start over, though this will essentially kill our SEO for those pages.(Which as there are duplicates, I can only imagine how much they are going to be penalized by it)

Would anyone have any advice other than truncating and starting over?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

[jstumpner]

Is it creating a new url for each option (size, color, etc) as well as what page it shows up on or other various sort orders (by price, by size, etc.) and session id's that you could exclude? Are you sure they are truly duplicates?

[BillFerguson]

This is an issue to to set-up. When you set up multiple ecommerce websites on Magento as 'Stores', then all SKUs will load on other domains. if they were set-up as 'Websites' then this would alleviate the issue. However, with Stores you are able to share shopping carts (i.e. Add a product from website A and checkout on website B).

What I did was turn off the XML cron jobs and set-up cross-domain canonicals. Also make sure your session IDs (/?SID=) are working properly. Not sure if this solves the technical issues, but should help clear up dupe content.

[PinpointDesigns]

I'm not sure the answers previously presented are related to the issues you're having. Having worked with Magento for a long time, this can be an issue that occurs over and over again.

To answer your initial question, truncating your core_url_rewrite table will remove all of these URLs, but it'll only delay the problem until it reoccurs again in the future (unless you've had a problem in the past which has been rectified). You're also correct in that any rewrites in the system previously there will disappear, so you'll probably end up with a lot of crawl issues appearing in Search Console.

Your best move would be to find out why you have so many URLs in there in the first place. Do you have a huge product catalog with multiple stores? Or is this something to do with an issue in your Magento version or some setup issues. The most common time this usually occurs is if two products get added to your site with the same URL Key. Every time the reindex process runs, your core_url_rewrite table will grow. You could check this by looking at the number of rows in the table, reindexing the site and if it grows further, then it's likely to be the problem. The quickest way to fix this is to ensure all URL key are unique.

There's also an article here about duplicate keys - https://firebearstudio.com/blog/magento-url-reindex-core_url_rewrite-duplicates-patch.html - this should hopefully clear the issue.

I hope this helps! If it doesn't solve the problem, then sending over a little more information around the number of stores, catalog site and the split between system generated URL rewrites and custom URL rewrites would be great so we can try to help further!

Thanks,
Lewis

[Vijay-Gaur]

Hi,

I found the exact problem you are facing with a solution on this link

http://magento.stackexchange.com/questions/17553/magento-core-url-rewrite-table-excessively-large

There are patch codes available on this link, however do read this reply on this page

Bugs in earlier (and possibly current) versions of Magento is one. Another is there's logic in this table that tries to track changes to the URL key value so that 301/302 rewrites are setup for old products. Because of this, and complicating things, truncating the table and regenerating may make existing URL rewrites go away, and this will have an unknown effect on your search engine listing (not necessity bad, just hard to predict).

My general advice to clients who ask is

1. Leave the giant growing table as is if you don't have a good handle on your URL/SEO situation

2. Until the table size starts being a problem (generating site maps, for example). When that happens, get a handle on your URL/SEO situation.

3. Once you have a handle on your URL/SEO situation, backup the table, then truncate the table and regenerate. Address any URL/SEO problems caused by the truncating.

4. Automate step 3

Trying to fix this on the Magento code level is admirable, but you'll be swimming upstream. Sometimes it's better to accept that "That's just Magento being Magento", and to solve the problem with and external process.

I hope this helps, if you have further questions, then post a response, I will be happy to answer.

Regards,

Vijay