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
-
Google selecting incorrect URL as canonical: 'Duplicate, submitted URL not selected as canonical'
Hi there, A number of our URLs are being de-indexed by Google. When looking into this using Google Search Console the same message is appearing on multiple pages across our sites: 'Duplicate, submitted URL not selected as canonical' 'IndexingIndexing allowed? YesUser-declared canonical - https://www.mrisoftware.com/ie/products/real-estate-financial-software/Google-selected canonical - https://www.mrisoftware.com/uk/products/real-estate-financial-software/'Has anyone else experienced this problem?How can I get Google to select the correct, user-declared canoncial? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | nfrank0 -
Godaddy and Soft 404's
Hello, We've found that a website we manage has a list of not-found URLS in Google webmaster tools which are "soft 404's " according to Google. I went to the hosting company GoDaddy to explain and to see what they could do. As far as I can see GoDaddy's server are responding with a 200 HTTP error code - meaning that the page exists and was served properly. They have sort of disowned this as their problem. Their server is not serving up a true 404 response. This is a WordPress site. 1) Has anyone seen this problem before with GoDaddy?Is it a GoDaddy problem?2) Do you know a way to sort this issue? When I use the command site:mydomain.co.uk the number of URLs indexed is about right except for 2 or 3 "soft URLs" . So I wonder why webmaster tools report so many yet I can't see them all in the index?
Technical SEO | | AL123al0 -
Possible duplicate content issue with my Blog and archive pages . Any help greatly appreciated
Dear Mozzers, I have been looking at my news section on my eCommerce site and I think I may have a duplicate content issue and wanted some advice on whether I do and if so , how best I handle this. http://www.website.co.uk/news
Technical SEO | | PeteC12
http://www.website.co.uk/news/page:1
http://www.website.co.uk/news/page:2
http://www.website.co.uk/news/page:3
http://www.website.co.uk/news/limit:9999 (This is show all) I also have the ability of showing articles by month : http://www.website.co.uk/news/archive/2015/04 (April)
http://www.website.co.uk/news/archive/2015/03 (March)
http://www.website.co.uk/news/archive/2015/02 (Feb)
http://www.website.co.uk/news/archive/2015/01 (Jan) I am wondering if there's a duplicate issue here or not given that I also articles by month as well and if so how best I handle this.? I already do pagination on my news pages (page 1 , page 2) by using rel=next and rel=Prev but I don't have an canconical or anything as yet. I enclose a couple of links if this would help and would appreciate if someone could take a browse. I have a View All link on my homepage for for all news items - http://goo.gl/JPPIvQ I which have a different urls - March 2015 Articles - http://goo.gl/0O1wYD and April 2015 articles - http://goo.gl/GdW2oK On another note, These articles are also linked to from the relevant category landing pages on my website to help with SEO. I have not used H tags on the article links in my landing pages , just displaying the weblink back to the news article.I've done this to try and improve the PR and rankings of my landing pages. Just wondered if anyone has any comments as to whether thats a good or bad idea and whether I could improve it in any way - An example is here (scroll down the page to the pressure washing guides) - http://goo.gl/nnRE49 Thanks Pete0 -
How Does Google's "index" find the location of pages in the "page directory" to return?
This is my understanding of how Google's search works, and I am unsure about one thing in specific: Google continuously crawls websites and stores each page it finds (let's call it "page directory") Google's "page directory" is a cache so it isn't the "live" version of the page Google has separate storage called "the index" which contains all the keywords searched. These keywords in "the index" point to the pages in the "page directory" that contain the same keywords. When someone searches a keyword, that keyword is accessed in the "index" and returns all relevant pages in the "page directory" These returned pages are given ranks based on the algorithm The one part I'm unsure of is how Google's "index" knows the location of relevant pages in the "page directory". The keyword entries in the "index" point to the "page directory" somehow. I'm thinking each page has a url in the "page directory", and the entries in the "index" contain these urls. Since Google's "page directory" is a cache, would the urls be the same as the live website (and would the keywords in the "index" point to these urls)? For example if webpage is found at wwww.website.com/page1, would the "page directory" store this page under that url in Google's cache? The reason I want to discuss this is to know the effects of changing a pages url by understanding how the search process works better.
Technical SEO | | reidsteven750 -
Fowarding URL's Have No SEO Value?
Good Morning from -3 Degrees C no paths gritted wetherby UK 😞 Imagine this scenario. http://www.barrettsteel.com/ has been optimised for "Steel suppliers" & "Steel stockholders". After runnning an on page SEO moz report its recommended that the target terms should be placed in the url eg www.steel-suppliers.co.uk Now the organisation will not change the url but think setting up a forwarding url eg registering www.steel-suppliers.co.uk to then forward to www.steel-suppliers.co.uk will be of benfit from an SEO perspective. But i think not. So my question is please "is a forwarding url of no value but a permanent URL (struggling for the terminology to describe the url a site is set up with) such as www.steel-suppliers.co.uk would be of value?" Any insights welcome 🙂
Technical SEO | | Nightwing0 -
Help with Rel Canonical on Wordpress?
Crawl Diagnostics is showing a lot of Rel Canonical warnings, I've installed Wordpress SEO by Joose De Valk and Home Canonical URL plugins without success. Any ideas? I'm getting a lot of URL's that I thought I blocked from being indexed, such as author pages, category pages, etc. I'm also getting stuff like "recessionitis.com/?homeq=recent" and "recessionitis.com/page/2/", those pages are similar to my homepage. I thought those plugins were suppose to automatically clean things up.. anyone use these plugins that have any helpful hints?
Technical SEO | | 10JQKAs0 -
Url's don't want to show up in google. Please help?
Hi Mozfans 🙂 I'm doing a sitescan for a new client. http://www.vacatures.tuinbouw.nl/ It's a dutch jobsite. Now the problem is here: The url http://www.vacatures.tuinbouw.nl/vacatures/ is in google.
Technical SEO | | MaartenvandenBos
On the same page there are jobs (scroll down) with a followed link.
To a url like this: http://www.vacatures.tuinbouw.nl/vacatures/722/productie+medewerker+paprika+teelt/ The problem is that the second url don't show up in google. When i try to make a sitemap with Gsitecrawler the second url isn't in de sitemap.. :S What am i doing wrong? Thanks!0 -
Why are my pages getting duplicate content errors?
Studying the Duplicate Page Content report reveals that all (or many) of my pages are getting flagged as having duplicate content because the crawler thinks there are two versions of the same page: http://www.mapsalive.com/Features/audio.aspx http://www.mapsalive.com/Features/Audio.aspx The only difference is the capitalization. We don't have two versions of the page so I don't understand what I'm missing or how to correct this. Anyone have any thoughts for what to look for?
Technical SEO | | jkenyon0