I was recently going through the Joomla! forums: Joomla! SEO - Duplicate Content, and noticed that there’s some major confusion regarding how the Joomla! Core SEF works in terms of creating SEF URL’s and managing duplicate content.
In response to the problem, which originally was posted about back in 2008, but followed up on more recently (June 2011), I posted a response that apparently people liked and understood more than most people’s responses. From the response thus far, I was asked to provide a more detailed description of how to control duplicate content using Joomla! Core SEF.
I will first cover the concepts, and then move into the actual “How To’s”.
Concepts Clarified
Firstly, it needs to be known that the Joomla! Core SEF does not work on “Section / Category / Aricle” alias, or in the case of J! 1.6+, “Category / Category / Article” alias. Instead, Joomla! Core SEF actually is based on the Menu alias for the menus that you create within your Joomla! website.
Additionally, it doesn’t just focus on the “mainmenu” that is created in the site either, as you can name the menus whatever you wish.
If you have multiple menus:
And you create menu items within each separate menu to the same content, Joomla! will naturally create multiple pathways to that content, thereby creating your duplicate content issues. This is an issue with or without the Joomla! Core SEF turned on.
However, if you understand this concept and learn the proper configuration of your menus, you can easily keep your duplicate content to a minimum (it may not be entirely possible to avoid with the J! Core SEF, but I’ll cover that a bit later in this post).
Satisfying Solutions
- First things first - you always want to try and create only one menu item for any piece of content, as this will be the easiest way to keep your duplicate content to a minimum.However, it’s typically unrealistic to think that any decently sized website will control all its content through only one menu. You may, based on your planned IA, find that multiple types of menus (top menu, side menu, footer menus), and multiple labels of those menus (about, history, home page, services, etc., etc.) are appropriate for usability purposes—and that’s just fine!So, how do we create multiple menus, with multiple menu items, all going to the same place and not create duplicate content?With the Menu Type “Alias”, of course!
A (relatively) quick video explaining the concept and process to resolve duplicate content in Joomla!:
In Summary:
Using Joomla! Core SEF is a great out-of-the-box solution and it works well. Typically the errors & issues, as with most things, will be created by the user, not the system. So make sure that you use the “Alias” menu type when setting up new menu buttons that go to the same page but from a different menu—always! Getting in the practice of this will make it so much easier when building new sites, or redoing your site in the future.
In the future, I will cover 3rd party SEF components, more specifically AceSEF & sh404SEF, which both have their pros and cons, and how they can be of help in terms of your URL rewriting & SEO metadata (title tags, meta data, rel=canonical, etc.)
Regal Creative is a web design & SEO firm in Milwaukee that develops heavily in Joomla!. If you are in need of content management capabilities with your website, are looking to build a website that has features such as a blog, calendar, business directory, membership / user management capabilities, photo galleries, news distribution, and more; get in contact with us to let us know; we’d love to submit a proposal for your project!
316 N. Milwaukee St.
Thank you for this very informative post and video. I’ve been searching for a solution for three days. I finally got some hope that this will help.
I already created the alias menus. One question I have is that my site doesn’t have drop down menus but that won’t affect the solution, will it?
Thanks so much.
Hi @simplesite!
We appreciate your feedback on the post and are glad that it helped you out to some degree.
In terms of drop down menus or not, it really doesn’t matter. Duplicate content and the usage of “alias” as a menu type can be applied to any separate menu that has menu items going to the same place, but through different hierarchy’s.
Also, this process won’t necessarily resolve all of your duplicate content issues. You may have to take additional steps to resolve the issues by declaring “rel=canonical” tags, etc.
Ultimately, if you wanted to set the meta information, rel=canonical, and URL management, I would recommend using AceSEF (sh404 si good too, but it doesn’t manage the rel=canonical (yet - I’m assuming that vdrover and the anything-digital gang will probably recognize the importance of that tag and add in the management capability of it sooner or later (hopefully sooner))).
Hope this helps. Let me know if not or if you have any other questions.
Cheers
Kyle
Amazing how after all these years I still had to search for days to find this solution. THANK YOU for such a simple and straightforward explanation, as well as your extremely helpful video. Now, here’s the fly in the ointment for us. Due to the nature of our content, we have hundreds of articles that are related to multiple categories. To manage this, we use FLEXIcontent. Unfortunately, this results in Joomla still creating multiple URLs. For example, to get to Article ID 1423 (Berryhill Baja Grill) you can navigate through the main menu seven different ways:
Where to Go> Restaurant Directory> (and then selecting page 2 at the bottom) or via
Where to Go> Restaurant Directory> By Type or Cuisine> Bars & Clubs or via
Where to Go> Restaurant Directory> By Type or Cuisine> Mexican & Tex-Mex or via
Where to Go> Restaurant Directory> By Type or Cuisine> Delivery Available or via
Where to Go> Restaurant Directory> By Village> Market Street or via
About Town> Market Street> Restaurants or via
About Town> Town Center> Restaurants
Your solution helps us to fix one problem; getting the same result for Where to Go> Restaurant Directory> By Village> Market Street and About Town> Market Street> Restaurants, but neither of these these menu items (nor any of the others) ultimately end at Berryhill Baha Grill; you still have to select the article from the blog layout that is returned when navigating the main menu. This of course results in seven different URL’s. What can we do to solve THIS problem? Any suggestions you have would be incredibly appreciated. Thank you again!!!
Hi Ron,
Thanks for posting your questions! I’ll try to respond and help you out to the best of my ability:
1. To preface, we don’t have much experience with Flexicontent. I’m not the largest fan of their template engine and the times that we’ve tested it out, it’s been more or less pretty buggy. For that reason, we have stayed away and worked with other CCK type components (JReviews, Zoo, etc.).
2. The menu fix is only applicable for pages that are linked with menu items. So, that being said, one way you could work around your issue is by creating a “hidden” menu that is not published on the front end.
From there, you would need to create the proper structure to your content (where to go > restaurant directory > by type or cuisine > bars & clubs > your listing) for each item on your site.
Given that you have a lot of content, this could be a relatively daunting task, but the fact remains that Joomla! is a CMS, which means its content is dynamic. Without specific pathways to content, you will never have something that is technically “static” (which is why you are still having the dup. content issue still - your Flexi articles are setup in a dynamic blog view, and there is no actual link to them).
3. I see that you have AceSEF installed (the free version by the looks of it). I may recommend you looking at what options you have for a Flexicontent plugin for Ace, and try to configure it. From my experience with Flexi, you should be able to set the article to be in one category predominately, while giving the option to show in other categories as well. I know that is possible with Zoo CCK.
If that is possible with Flexi, you may be able to set, with the Ace plugin for Flexi, the URL’s be built based on alias as compared to menus… If you can, then that should *possibly* fix your issue with multiple pathways (no guarantee though, obviously…).
4. I also see that you have SEF disabled on certain categories, such as “Delivery Available”? Not sure why, and that may be giving you grief as well.
Well Ron, I hope this answers some of your questions. And sorry for the late reply, it’s been quite busy here lately.
Let me know if you have any other questions, etc. based on what I’ve mentioned. Remember, configuration is the number one issue in most cases, so make sure to test out different settings if you’re using AceSEF and get the plugins for the components you want to have SEF for.
Cheers,
Kyle
Thank you for taking the time to write such an in-depth response. We’ve been working our way through correcting our URLs and are taking your suggestions into consideration going forward. You’ve been a great help!
Have followed the Joomla! forum post where you spoke out this extremely clear howto. Thank you v much for having taken the time to share your knowlewdge in such a clear video!
We were worrying also about the infinite number of our Joomla 1.5 http…search…” duplicated contents showed by Google. But will be content preventing duplicate Content with Joomla’s Core SEF after reading this:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/09/demystifying-duplicate-content-penalty.html
Thank you Kyle and Regal Creative