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I've been pulling my hairs to figure out what's going on with my Magento store (1.7.0.2 version). 80% url-keys are appended with strange numbers in two different forms. Some are like this http://www.example.com/product-name-2886-351.html, random numbers assigned after my dress style numbers, but these randomly-assigned numbers are not changing after added by the system.

Another version URL with strange numbers are like this: http://www.example.com/product-name-2926.html. Notice the style number "2926" is assigned by the system. "2886" was originally input on the URL key section when we added this product.

Some SEO people told me it's because we uploaded the CSV again and again without truncating the url_rewrite table, so it created the duplicate version of products. That's why Magento does this to differentiate products. We uploaded CSV many times at the initial stage but there are some products are not affected by this. I'm not technical at all. I'm very confused by all this, but I don't quite believe this is the reason happening here.

After reading some threads, I know there are some real experts out there. Could you please help? If we upgrade to Magento 1.8, would this problem go away?

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  • kat,please read link stackoverflow.com/questions/13614738/… here describe details
    – Amit Bera
    Mar 30, 2014 at 5:13
  • Hi I'm also facing with the same issue...dynamically some some no. is added to the end of the url.. Eg: www.example.com/product-name.2435.html Should I follow the above procedure, that will work fine for me or not.. Please help.. Waiting for reply Thanks
    – Naresh
    Mar 27, 2020 at 7:46

2 Answers 2

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Typically this is caused because you have categories or products with duplicate urls. i.e a category with www.example.com/hats and a product with same url. Every time you save the product you will incrementally increase the core rewrite. The number you see at the end of your URL. The other main culprit is configurable products.

Step 1

Make sure the URL you’re trying to achieve is in fact unique.

There is a reason Magento appends these numbers to the end of your URLs, because it actually already exists. It’s like creating two categories with the same name in WordPress, the second category will have the URL “/category-2/”.

Step 2

Do a database backup

Open up PHPMyAdmin or something similar.

Find the core_url_rewrite table.

Search for your url in the request path. In my example I typed: "hats%"
this will find anything beginning with hats in the url.

Step 3

Just remember if you hard linked this page it will now 404. So if there is a risk of this, make sure you create a new redirect after this for that page.

Delete all rows from the search results.

Step 4

Reindex your Catalog URL rewrites.

Step 5

Go back to the category or product and click save.

Your urls should now be as desired!

The upgrade will help with the underlying cause of this, but will not correct it. You will still need to run through this process regardless.

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  • Hi Rob, thanks so much for your reply! I'll try it and let you know how it goes. Thanks again!
    – Kate
    Apr 1, 2014 at 17:04
  • @7ochem, thanks for the edits! It looks so pretty!
    – Rob
    Jun 7, 2017 at 16:06
  • I know it's a very old subject nut it just happened to me and thanks to you guys I know how to solve it ;) Thank you
    – Rob D. A.
    Jul 13, 2017 at 8:46
  • @RobertA. Glad I could help!
    – Rob
    Jul 13, 2017 at 12:00
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To remedy this issue once and for all, use this extension. It fixes a underlying Magento bug that keeps changing the ending digits of duplicate product URLs after URL rewriting re-indexes or after you change product categories.

Install the extension and make sure you check the "Unique URL Key Verification" so whenever you create or edit a product with a potentially duplicate URL key, Magento prompts you to use a different one so you don't end up with duplicate product URLs in the first place, thus no strange numbers appended at the end.

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