Joomla creating duplicate pages, then the duplicate page's canonical points to itself - help!
-
Using Joomla, every time I create an article a subsequent duplicate page is create, such as:
/latest-news/218-image-stabilization-task-used-to-develop-robot-brain-interface
and
/component/content/article?id=218:image-stabilization-task-used-to-develop-robot-brain-interface
The latter being the duplicate.
This wouldn't be too much of a problem, but the canonical tag on the duplicate is pointing to itself.. creating mayhem in Moz and Webmaster tools. We have hundreds of duplicates across our website and I'm very concerned with the impact this is having on our SEO!
I've tried plugins such as sh404SEF and Styleware extensions, however to no avail.
Can anyone help or know of any plugins to fix the canonicals?
-
Hi! I had the luck to talk with a joomla developer and he gave me a solution that sounds too easy for me.
The duplication is generated by the categories.
Therefore we set up all the menu items like index, follow and categories like no index no follow.
He said it works perfectly for him.
I cant believe it is so easy. I will make a trial and let you know if that solves it. -
I wasn't linking to show you an article on how to fix, I was linking to show you the article setup we use for our blog. We use one menu item per article.
For your fix, I would create a new sitemap for all the root and canonical URLs you want indexed. Then create an htaccess document that redirects the pages to the proper version. This will only allow you to visit one version.
An additional option if you are seeing the URLs show up indexed is to request a URL removal in Google webmaster tools for the duplicate versions, but this is a bit more risky. I would do this only if your blog gets a ton of hits and you don't want to place additional load on the server to process a lot of redirects per day.
Hope this helps!
-
What about when it is not coming from blogs?
For example:http://www.spain-internship.com/fr/faq/termes-et-conditions
http://www.spain-internship.com/fr/faq/termes-et-conditions/161-work-in-london-de
http://www.spain-internship.com/fr/faq/termes-et-conditions/192-home-page-sv
http://www.spain-internship.com/fr/faq/termes-et-conditions/190-home-page-nl
And like this 45 more. It makes a canonical to itself but....this is not the right solution, should point to sef one.
Let me know! By the way, cant find the right article in your page. Direct link?
-
We manually set up our blog pages. It give us the most control over every aspect. Granted it's not the fastest way to do it, but it only takes about an extra 3 minutes per post. You can view how its set up here: http://www.webdesignandcompany.com/seo-tips-for-small-business
-
This may be old but if you had a clue, it would be great to hear. Searching for a fix.
-
Has anyone else had problems with canonical tags and Joomla?
When you create an article, a duplicate page is created with the canonical pointing to itself. Therefore, having two exact pages, both claiming to be the original.
It seems to be a widespread issue but with seemingly little solutions...
Does anyone know of any plugins which may solve this? I've looked but with no luck.
Joe
-
Hi David,
Thanks for your response!
The answer to all your questions is 'Yes'.
SEF urls and url re-writing (apache using .htaccess)
And yes, blog category
Menus -> Main menu -> Latest News -> Menu item type = Category Blog
You can see an example here:
We want the first one to be right and the second to then use the first as the canonical url – i.e. as canonical is supposed to work!
Any ideas? I'm pulling my hair out over this!
-
href="http://www.scientifica.uk.com/latest-news/218-image-stabilization-task-used-to-develop-robot-brain-interface" rel="canonical" />
How are your articles set up in Joomla? Do you enable URL rewriting along with SEF URLs?
Seems like you are using the blog category to quickly add in new articles, is this true?
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
What to do when half of my pages aren't being viewed?
My site is roughly 1000 pages. I've begun refreshing older content. I noticed about half of my pages have no incoming traffic. Should I look at combining some of these pages and 301 redirecting the former links to that new "bigger" page and then having my home page show that new consolidated content? They don't have good back links either. Example layout now: Home Page - Restaurants [show list of cuisines] - User clicks on Italian [show list of all Italian restaurants] - Choice 1 - Choice 2 Even though my main page is seen by about 100,000 people a month, it doesn't seem like anyone is interested in going down that path so none of the restaurants are clicked. How could I improve the user interface/experience and incorporate best Google practices? Thanks, Steve
Technical SEO | | recoil0 -
Duplicate content on Places to Stay listings pages
Hello, I've just crawled our website https://www.i-escape.com/ to find we have a duplicate content issue. Every places to stay listing page has identical content (over 1,500 places) due to the fact it's based on user searches or selections. If we hide this pages using canonical tags, will we lose our visibility for each country and/or region we promote hotels? Any help on this would be hugely appreciated! Thanks so much Clair
Technical SEO | | iescape0 -
Shortening URL's
Hello again Mozzers, I am debating what could be a fairly drastic change to the company website and I would appreciate your thoughts. The URL structure is currently as follows Product Pages
Technical SEO | | ATP
www.url.co.uk/product.html Category Pages
www.url.co.uk/products/category/subcategory.html I am debating removing the /products/ section as i feel it doesn't really add much and lengthens the url with a pointless word. This does mean however redirecting about 50-60 pages on the website, is this worth it? Would it do more damage than good? Am i just being a bit OCD and it wont really have an impact? As always, thanks for the input0 -
What's wrong with this robots.txt
Hi. really struggling with the robots.txt file
Technical SEO | | Leonie-Kramer
this is it: User-agent: *
Disallow: /product/ #old sitemap
Disallow: /media/name.xml When testing in w3c.org everything looks good, testing is okay, but when uploading it to the server, Google webmaster tools gives 3 errors. Checked it with my collegue we both don't know what's wrong. Can someone take a look at this and give me the solution.
Thanx in advance! Leonie1 -
Duplicate Content issue in Magento: The product pages are available true 3 URL's! How can we solve this?
Right now the product page "gedroogde goji bessen" (Dutch for: dried goji berries) is available true 3 URL's! **http://www.sportvoeding.net/gedroogde-goji-bessen ** =>
Technical SEO | | Zanox
By clicking on the product slider on the homepage
http://www.sportvoeding.net/superfood/gedroogde-goji-bessen =>
First go to sportvoeding.net/superfood (main categorie) and than clicking on "gedroogde Goji bessen"
http://www.sportvoeding.net/superfood/goji-bessen/gedroogde-goji-bessen =>
When directly go to the subcategorie "Goji Bessen" true the menu and there clicking on "gedroogde Goji Bessen" We want to have the following product URL:
http://www.sportvoeding.net/superfood/goji-bessen/gedroogde-goji-bessen Does someone know´s a good Exetension for this issue?0 -
Duplicate Page Title Crawl Error Issue
In the last crawl for on of our client websites the duplicate page title and page content numbers were very high. They are reading every page twice. http://www.barefootparadisevacations.com and http://barefootparadisevacations.com are being read as two different pages with the same page title. After the last crawl I used our built in redirect tool to redirect the urls, but the most recent crawl showed the same issue. Is this issue really hurting our rankings and if so, any suggestions on a fix for the problem? Thank you!
Technical SEO | | LoveMyPugs0 -
Duplicates on the page
Hello SEOMOZ, I've one big question about one project. We have a page http://eb5info.com/eb5-attorneys and a lot of other similar pages. And we got a big list of errors, warnings saying that we have duplicate pages. But in real not all of them are same, they have small differences. For example - you select "State" in the left sidebar and you see a list on the right. List on the right panel is changing depending on the what you selecting on the left. But on report pages marked as duplicates. Maybe you can give some advices how to improve quality of the pages and make SEO better? Thanks Igor
Technical SEO | | usadvisors0 -
Ranked on Page 1, now between page 40-50... Please help!
My site, http://goo.gl/h0igI was ranking on page one for many of our biggest keywords. All of a sudden, we completely fell off. I believe I'm down somewhere between page 40-50. I have no warning or error messages in webmaster tools. Can anyone please help me identify what the problem is? This is completely unexpected and I don't know how to fix it... Thanks in advance
Technical SEO | | Prime850