Joomla creating duplicate pages, then the duplicate page's canonical points to itself - help!

[JamesPearce]

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?

[David-Kley]

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?

[JamesPearce]

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:

http://www.scientifica.uk.com/latest-news/218-image-stabilization-task-used-to-develop-robot-brain-interface

http://www.scientifica.uk.com/component/content/article?id=218:image-stabilization-task-used-to-develop-robot-brain-interface

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!

[JamesPearce]

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

[Eurasmus.com]

This may be old but if you had a clue, it would be great to hear. Searching for a fix.

[David-Kley]

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

[Eurasmus.com]

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?

[David-Kley]

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!

[Eurasmus.com]

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.