Possible duplicate URLs and how bad for SEO it is ?

[oudouz]

Hi, I have a website built on top of Joomla! (http://www.dzautoguide.com). I've got a Category > Sub-Category > Sub-Category ... Sub-Category > Article structure.

The problem is that, the two URLs:
mysite.com/Category > Sub-Category > Sub-Category ... Sub-Category
mysite.com/Category > Sub-Category > Sub-Category ... Sub-Category > Article

.. they point to the same content. So would this be counted as duplicate URLs ? and most importantly, how bad it would affect Google Ranking ? because I got some different content, and it is being pretty well indexed compared to this structured articles.

And how would I fix it ? Are canonical URLs the solution ?

[sudo-web]

There is nothing like a duplicate URL. Every URL is unique as such https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Resource_Locator.

But what you mean is duplicate Content and this is a bad thing for SEO. Duplicate Content means that two (or more) URL's showing exact(or almost) the same content.

Sometimes you cannot prohibit this because of technical reasons.
There the canonical Tag comes handy. On all the pages (URLs) that are a duplication of one specific URL you adding this canonical Tag that than refers to this one specific URL.
https://en.onpage.org/wiki/Canonical_Tag

[oudouz]

There is nothing like a duplicate URL. Every URL is unique as such https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Resource_Locator.

But what you mean is duplicate Content and this is a bad thing for SEO. Duplicate Content means that two (or more) URL's showing exact(or almost) the same content.

Sometimes you cannot prohibit this because of technical reasons.
There the canonical Tag comes handy. On all the pages (URLs) that are a duplication of one specific URL you adding this canonical Tag that than refers to this one specific URL.
https://en.onpage.org/wiki/Canonical_Tag

Thanks Sudo-web for your reply. But can you help me fix this ? I'm using Sh404SEF plugin, and Joomla! 2.5, what should I do exactly ? Google is indexing both :
mysite.com/.../.../category (article is being displayed in a blog view)
mysite.com/.../.../category/article.html

I guess that's causing a severe Google ranking hit. Should I use canonical URL on each category with a blog view to display the (article.html) version ?

[sudo-web]

As far as I know you can add a canonical tag to every link that is managed by sh404SEF. So find all that are duplication in your opinion and a link them to the "original" as canonical link.

For more information refer to sh404sef documentation:
https://weeblr.com/documentation/produc ... nical.html