How to Remove Joomla Canonical and Duplicate Page Content

[deskstudio]

I've  attempted to follow advice from the Q&A section.

Currently on the site www.cherrycreekspine.com, I've edited the .htaccess file to help with 301s - all pages redirect to www.cherrycreekspine.com.

Secondly, I'd added the canonical statement in the header of the web pages.

I have cut the Duplicate Page Content in half ... now  I have a remaining 40 pages to fix up.

This is my practice site to try and understand what SEOmoz can do for me.

I've looked at some of your videos on Youtube ... I feel like I'm scrambling around to the Q&A and the internet to understand this product. I'm reading the beginners guide.... any other resources would be helpful.

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Hi Todd,

Oh no, looks like all your canonicals are pointing towards the homepage....

<link rel="<a class="attribute-value">canonical</a>" href="[http://www.cherrycreekspine.com<](view-source:http://www.cherrycreekspine.com%3C/)"/>

Also looks like there's an extra carrot "<" at the end of the URL. Looks like it's coming from the wonky code.

Regardless, this isn't what you want. This basically tells search engines that every page is a canonical of the homepage - and that all these other pages aren't important on their own. It's likely search engines will start to drop these pages out of their index unless this tag is removed immediately. Reminds me of Dr. Pete's canonical nightmares.

In short... remove that canonical ASAP. It's probably better to have some duplicate content than a sitewide canonical that points to your homepage.

Have you tried the Joomla Canonicalisation Plugin? Haven't tried it myself, but it might be smidgen easier than trying to code the php yourself. You can find it here: http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/site-management/seo-a-metadata/url-canonicalization-/5355

My guess is you can completely remove whatever manual canonical code you wrote, and the plugin will take care of the rest.

Remember, when the code is working properly, each page with point to itself (without extra parameters and so on) the way a proper canonical should.

Best of luck!

[IPROdigital]

View page source shows HTML. If I can't see the PHP file i.e. which generates the HTML it's impossible for me to know how. I'm not very clear on this. You can PM the file to me if you want - but don't send me any passwords please.

[deskstudio]

Yikes... so, I checked the template html file and all including PHP info is there...

View page source did not show all the code.

So, still stuck.

[deskstudio]

Hold on .... not all the copy was properly entered by me... I'll fix and retest.

[deskstudio]

Mr., I replaced the line in the html but no change. I'm completely new to this, so please forgive me. All of these concepts are new to me.

Any other thoughts or direction? I looked at one of the Whiteboard videos... buy over my head.

Thanks in advance... Todd

[IPROdigital]

You need to code it again:

In the HTML I can see on Line 15:

rel="canonical" href="http://www.cherrycreekspine.com<?php echo parse_url($canonical, PHP_URL_PATH); ?>"/>

You need to write everything after href="

and before "/>

in php; probably:

<link rel="canonical" href="<?php echo="" '<a="" class=" " href="http://www.cherrycreekspine.com%26lt%3B/?php%20echo%20parse_url($canonical,%20PHP_URL_PATH);%20?%3E" target="_blank">http://www.cherrycreekspine.com<'.parse_url($canonical, PHP_URL_PATH); ?>"/></link rel="canonical" href="<?php>

If it doesnt sort it, post again and I'll try to help you further.

Also, you either apply canonical values or remove duplicate content (the post title is slightly confused, I think)