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!