How to get rid of duplicate urls?

[nirit100]

When I create an article and put this article under some category, Google sees the article twice:
once in the category, and the second time in the menu. This duplication is not good for seo. What can I do about it?

[jaysean]

first is Arno Zijlstra on his Joomla Blog , he wrote a short post pointing to the first Google webmasters Blog and About how Google thinks about Joomla!(http://www.woofandwarp.com/blog/2-jooml ... ogle-think) and duplicate content which is followed by some fine comments by Steve from Alledia and I really like the comment of Johan Janssens "Finally ! Been fighting this fight for 3 years now …".

Which is really true and people think multiple URLs to one article is a bad thing from Joomla!, but also WordPress and Drupal will do the same.

But as Adam Lasnik already wrote in 2006 Deftly dealing with duplicate content(http://googlewebmastercentral.[URL banned]. ... ntent.html) Google does a good job on filtering the best link to an article itself. (That article has some tips on how to improve things from a search engine point of view)
Vanessa Fox did a kind of follow up on that post also on Duplicate Content(http://googlewebmastercentral.[URL banned]. ... t-smx.html) also giving pointers to help your site to get better SERP results.

[nirit100]

Hi,

Thank you for the 2 links in Google webmaster tools, but the first link you gave seems to be spam...

[datatrond]

How large is your site? (number of unique URLs, number of duplicates)

If sh404sef don't help (out of the box), you've got spider traps (calenders, i.e.) and tools like SEOmoz and Google Webmaster Tools detect duplicate URLs, you might need to do some manual adjustments in your robots.txt and structural changes on your website to prevent Joomla to present unique articles on different URLs - which is really really bad for SEO and search engine visibility on business critical keywords and phrases - it can kill your rankings!

Canonical URL's can be a quick fix to prevent duplicates, but I stongly recommend taking a look at your code and check if sh404sef can handle this for you or there can be made changes in the template, etc..

Awaiting your feedback (and a link)!

Kind regards,

Trond

[Elliott Parker]

Hello,

Along the same lines, is there a way to scan your site to find all URL paths that are published? I find that the Sitemap is clean, but there are some odd URLs being published.

Thanks - Elliott