Canonical Urls in Joomla 4

[alan-donny]

I'm getting ready to move a large J3 site to J4. Since the site has been on J3, over the years I have seen lots of duplicate url variations appearing in search results.

I'd like to resolve this using canonical urls when the site moves to J4 without the need for an extension.

Canonical Urls seem to have been a tricky issue in Joomla and having had a good look round I can't see any J4 related information. I wondered if anyone can suggest a solution that utilises native J4 functionality?

Thank you in advance.

[quazar987]

You may try injecting canonical tag via javascript by making key-value map. This article here says it worked for them, might be worth a try
https://www.searchviu.com/en/javascript-canonical-tags/

[alan-donny]

Thank you minecrafthub4u and quazar987 for your thoughts.

Disowning Urls is possible but my point here is that I want to stop it happening in the first place when I move to J4.

Regarding the JS option, it's interesting but not an out of the box solution I'm looking at.

I'm sure I am not alone in having a need for canonical Urls. I have seen this issue discussed in the past but without a specific solution beyond "trying" extensions and a custom fields solution for J3.

Much as been said about the power of Joomla's core - it would be nice to see a robust J4 solution to this problem which in turn could be seen as another benefit of using Joomla over something else. After all, potentially being penalised for duplicate Urls is as much a consideration to potential new Joomla users as are other factors affecting site performance.

[brian]

After all, potentially being penalised for duplicate Urls is as much a consideration to potential new Joomla users as are other factors affecting site performance.

Penalised by who? Not by google!! https://www.searchenginejournal.com/goo ... or/394321/

Google’s John Mueller clarifies a misconception about duplicate content, saying it’s not a negative search ranking factor.

Having the same content repeated across multiple pages is not something that would cause a site to rank lower in search results.

[devp2082]

A canonical URL is the URL of the page that Google thinks is most representative from a set of duplicate pages on your site.

[alan-donny]

Of course not Brian, and thank you. I have learned though, overtime, that what is said and done can be some what dependent on the wind direction and how many weeks have passed... But that's just my take on it.

That aside, to me the idea of SEO friendly, clean Urls should be just that - not some jumbled up mess that appears in Google results. And some people do take note of Url formats.

It would be nice to be able to control the Urls that could be indexed but it seems problematic.

[alan-donny]

the page that Google thinks is most representative from a set of duplicate pages on your site.

Thanks - and that is what I want to be able to improve - I want Google to know, not think or assume which is the correct version.

[Footsteps]

I've very interested in this subject too. The article you linked to Brian is a very interesting one, thank you, but it is, I believe referring to duplicate sections of content on many pages not whole page ‘duplication’, there is a paragraph in that article:

“Duplicate pages can bloat a site and eat up crawl budget, but that’s a whole other topic which is not discussed in this video.”

So I do think the issue of Canonical URLs is still worth discussion.

[minhhoangus]

Thank quazar987

[lamtuong]

Joomla version 3.10.7 or later and joomla 4.x have Canonical integrated.

[alan-donny]

lamtuong, thank you. Please can you advise on how and where the settings are in Joomla or share a link to the documentation?

[lamtuong]

lamtuong, thank you. Please can you advise on how and where the settings are in Joomla or share a link to the documentation?

Hi,
i am having 4 websites, 1 joomla 4.x and 3 joomla 3.10.x.
I updated and see Canonical is already built in. However it gets duplicate error when I enable "System Cache" to "ON - Conservative caching".
With joomla 3.10.x version site I use Canonical Links Plugin, it works perfectly.
Website version joomla 4.x does not have Canonical Links Plugin yet.

here is the link Canonical Links Plugin
https://extensions.joomla.org/extension ... ll-in-one/

see attached picture!