Joomla: content accesible through all kinds of other links >> duplicate content?!

[conversal]

When i did a site: search on Google i've noticed all kind of URL's on my site were indexed, while i didn't add them to the Joomla navigation (or they were not linked anywhere on the site). Some examples:

• www.domain.com/1-articlename >> that way ALL articles are publicly visible, even if they are not linked to a menu-item... If by accident such a link get's shared it will be indexed in google, you can have 2 links with same content...

• www.domain.com/2-uncategorised >> same with categories, automatically these overview pages are visible to people who know this URL. On it you see all the articles that belong to that category.

• www.domain.com/component/content >> this gives an overview of all the categories inside your Joomla CMS

I think most will agree this is not good for your site's SEO? But how can this be solved? Is this some kind of setting within Joomla? Anyone who dealt with these problems already?

[crackingmedia]

Hi, you need to fix this by using the rel="canonical" in the Head section of pages so that where there are duplicates they all point to one of them as the original.

You can see more information here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139394?hl=en

In Joomla and other Content Management Systems, duplicate pages can sometimes be an issue because of the way search engine friendly URLs are created. With these systems you can generally find an extension / plugin to help resolve the issue. For Joomla there doesn't seems to be much on offer in their Extensions Directory, but you can see them here: http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/site-management/seo-a-metadata/url-canonicalization-

I hope that helps,
Peter