If you work in Joomla a fair bit as I do, at some point you will be considering the best way to eliminate duplicate content.
Within the Joomla.org site there are a couple of options for the Joomla Canonical URL Tag that you may want to consider. These are pretty simple to use, yet I find not the most effective way to deal with duplicate content in Joomla.
Joomla Canonical and SEO extensions in general are not as effective as the WordPress SEO plugins. If you have a choice in building a client site that needs more SEO ease and effectiveness out of the box then wordpress is your best product.
Joomla however is great product for more functionality and really has a much more sophisticated open source CMS platform for easily building and maintaining more complex business websites.
So if your are building a dynamic CMS using joomla, I find the best way to solve your duplicate content issues is by employing one or both of these methods:
1. Do a .htaccess rewrite and /or 2. Do a simple redirect within your cpanel
1 .htaccess rewrite
This file is located in your public html (www) folder.
What this does. It rewrites your domain from http://yourdomain.com to http://www.yourdomain.com
This is a permanent rewrite that will also be reflected in the address bar of your browser.
Add this script to your .htaccess.
| # mod_rewrite in use RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomain.com$ RewriteRule ^(.*)$ “http://www.yourdomain.com/$1” [R=301,L] |
2. The Redirect
Since Joomla doesn’t have any good Free plugins for this yet, here is a paid extension I found but have not yet tried…Joomla SEO 301 Redirect.
However if you have access to your cpanel you have two easy and better options:
1. Do a redirect under ‘Addon Domains’ and/or 2. Do a redirect under ‘Redirects’
1. Add-on Domains
Use this if you have a parked domain on top of your site domain and you want to make sure that Google isn’t indexing your parked domain. Just follow the instructions in ‘figure A’.
Figure A
2. Redirects
Use this if you want to redirect individual duplicate content pages.
i.e http://yourdomain.com/index.php?option=com_user&view=photos&return=aHR0c
to:
http://www.yourdomain.com/user/Charles-Grimm/photos.html
I know I have cut to the chase here pretty quickly, but if you have any questions or comments on SEO for Joomla please let me know in the comments area. Cheers C.
