Re-direct from products' URLS with categories towards products' URLS without categories: how to do it?

Question

this is my problem with my Magento-CMS based e-commerce: when the e-commerce was created, all products'URLS contained the categories. This means that for each product there could be several different URLS, beacuse of the categorization, but displaying the same content. I put an example here: the following 4 URLS all display the same content:

http://www.arredocasabiancheria.it/bagno/asciugamani/sfuso/asciugamani-hotel.html (URL with category) http://www.arredocasabiancheria.it/asciugamani-hotel.html (URL without category)

So, I set Magento configuration to show in the URL only product's name WITHOUT categories, to fix the problem. However, the problem still is not fixed: this because meanwhile those URLS have been indexed by Google, so I still find online all of them, which is not good for SEO. What I need to do, is redirecting each URL-with-category to its corrispondent URL-without-category: anyway, products in my e-commerce are so many, so I need to do it authomatically... How can I do it?

Answer 1

I think that you're problem is that you have a lot of duplicate content, because havin more than one URL by page is not necessary a bad thing.

Have you consider adding canonical URL to your page ?

You have a whole bunch of module to do that : http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/catalogsearch/result/?q=canonical&pl=0