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's the best way to test Angular JS heavy page for SEO?
Hi Moz community, Our tech team has recently decided to try switching our product pages to be JavaScript dependent, this includes links, product descriptions and things like breadcrumbs in JS. Given my concerns, they will create a proof of concept with a few product pages in a QA environment so I can test the SEO implications of these changes. They are planning to use Angular 5 client side rendering without any prerendering. I suggested universal but they said the lift was too great, so we're testing to see if this works. I've read a lot of the articles in this guide to all things SEO and JS and am fairly confident in understanding when a site uses JS and how to troubleshoot to make sure everything is getting crawled and indexed. https://sitebulb.com/resources/guides/javascript-seo-resources/ However, I am not sure I'll be able to test the QA pages since they aren't indexable and lives behind a login. I will be able to crawl the page using Screaming Frog but that's generally regarded as what a crawler should be able to crawl and not really what Googlebot will actually be able to crawl and index. Any thoughts on this, is this concern valid? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | znotes0 -
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 -
Duplicates - How to know if trailing slashes are creating duplicate pages?
Hi, How do you determine whether trailing slashes are creating duplicate pages? Search Console is showing both /about and about/ for example but how do I know whether this is a problem? Thanks James
Technical SEO | | CamperConnect140 -
The importance of url's - are they that important?
Hi Guys I'm reading some very contrasting and confusing reviews regarding urls and the impact they have on a sites ability to rank. My client has a number of flooring products, 71 to be exact - categorised under three sub categories 1. Gallery Wood - 2. Prefinshed Wood - 3. Parquet & Reclaimed. All of the 71 products are branded products (names that are completely unrelated to specific keyword search terms. This is having a major impact regarding how we optimise the site. FOR EXAMPLE: A product of the floor called "White Grain" - the "Key Word" we would like to rank this page for is Brown Engineered Flooring. I'm interested to know, should the name of the branded product match the url? What would you change to help this page rank better for the keyword - Brown Engineered Flooring. Title page: White Grain Url: thecompanyname.com/gallery-wood/white-grain (white grain is the name of the product) Key Word: Brown Engineered Flooring **Seo Title: **White Grain, Brown Engineered Flooring by X Meta Description: BLAH BLAH Brown Engineered Flooring BLAH BLAH Any feedback to help get my head around this would be really appreciated. Thank you.
Technical SEO | | GaryVictory0 -
New Page Showing Up On My Reports w/o Page Title, Words, etc - However, I didn't create it
I have a WordPress site and I was doing a crawl for errors and it is now showing up as of today that this page : https://thinkbiglearnsmart.com/event-registration/?event_id=551&name_of_event=HTML5 CSS3 is new and has no page title, words, etc. I am not even sure where this page or URL came from. I was messing with the robots.txt file to allow some /category/ posts that were being hidden, but I didn't re-allow anything with the above appendages. I just want to make sure that I didn't screw something up that is now going to impact my rankings - this was just a really odd message to come up as I didn't create this page recently - and that shouldnt even be a page accessible to the public. When I edit the page - it is using an Event Espresso (WordPress plugin) shortcode - and I don't want to noindex this page as it is all of my events. Sorry this post is confusing, any help or insight would be appreciated! I am also interested in hiring someone for some hourly consulting work on SEO type issues if anyone has any references. Thank you!
Technical SEO | | webbmason0 -
How similar do pages need to be to utilize the canonical tag
One of my pages is a help and questions page about completing a conversions and the other is the actual campaign landing page. They are both ranking for the same term. While the subject of both pages is similar the content is not. Is the rel canonical tag appropriate here?
Technical SEO | | cbarron0 -
404's in WMT are old pages and referrer links no longer linking to them.
Within the last 6 days, Google Webmaster Tools has shown a jump in 404's - around 7000. The 404 pages are from our old browse from an old platform, we no longer use them or link to them. I don't know how Google is finding these pages, when I check the referrer links, they are either 404's themselves or the page exists but the link to the 404 in question is not on the page or in the source code. The sitemap is also often referenced as a referrer but these links are definitely not in our sitemap and haven't been for some time. So it looks to me like the referrer data is outdated. Is that possible? But somehow these pages are still being found, any ideas on how I can diagnose the problem and find out how google is finding them?
Technical SEO | | rock220 -
How can i resolve Duplicate Page Content?
Hello, I have created one campaign over SEOmoz tools for my website AutoDreams.it i have found 159 duplicate page content. My problem is that this web site is about car adsso it is easy to create pages with duplicate content and also Car ads are placed byregistered users. How can i resolve this problem? Regards Francesco
Technical SEO | | francesco870
