Over time, I've frequently encountered this question, as well as numerous instances where misunderstandings about the term "canonical" and its use in SEO have led to problems, confusion, and a great deal of wasted time.
I've been meaning to write about the concept of canonical for a while and this week, a comment at the end of a support ticket finally prompted me to do so. The comment was :
I need to learn more about what "canonical" means
The thing is, canonical is used (mostly) in two different ways and they seem to contradict each other:
a page is canonical (or not)
a page has a canonical tag
The confusing part is that:
when a page has a canonical tag, it's usually because it's not canonical
It's been a busy last few days and weeks in the SEO and AI world so here is a quick run-down of the latest events. Read-on, several of them may directly affect you:
Google algorithm updates and manual penalties
On March 5, Google had not one but two published algorithm updates:
the March 2024 core update
the March 2024 spam update
These changes in Google algorithms are meant to improve Google search results quality and will be rolled out over the next few weeks.
They are designed both to reduce the predominance of low quality, made-for-SEO websites in search results. In additions to these 2 updates (it's very unusual to have several on the same day), Google started applying manual penalties to a larger number of websites.
As announced in December last year, this is the first release of the year for 4AI, and it's focused on making images!
Image generation - and modification - in 4AI
I have been very cautious so far about including image generation into 4AI, as my experiments with available models from OpenAI and others had mixed results, to say the least.
Getting images matching one's description required some kind of magic prompting, numerous experiments, and a fair bit of patience. Sometimes still with average results, and it would probably have been easier to get these images from existing pictures on specialized websites or of our own creation.
In addition, existing models were limited to square images, up to 1024 pixels. While such images are fine for social network use, I feel they are not as suited for display on desktop websites.
With the release of DALL·E 3 last year, it seems to me OpenAI has reached a quality level where generating images as part of 4AI, inside your Joomla website, could become both usable and useful. In addition, DALL·E 3 handles square images as before but also vertical or horizontal images up to 1792 pixels.
And so 4AI 4.0, released today, implements not only image creation but also image modification!
A quick post to keep you updated on what's happening both in and outside of the Joomla World and what's the outlook for 2024 here at Weeblr!
Big 4SEO feature release
We just released 4SEO 5.2.0 (4SEO full changelog is here) and it has several important new or changed things that should make your life both easier and more efficient:
Sitemaps now handled through Google Search Console
4SEO used to ping Google and Bing when a sitemap was ready or updated. Pinging means that we would make a request to a specific URL at Google, telling them "Hey, there's a new/modified sitemap for this website".
It was simple and quick but both Google and Bing have now stopped this service. So I took the opportunity to revamp the sitemap publication process and use 4SEO Search Console connection to directly submit sitemaps to Google.
This happens automatically and transparently each time your sitemap is created or updated. You can also manually submit your sitemap from within 4SEO at any time with a single click.
Today's one of these great days, where the Joomla community can regroup around a major new release of our preferred CMS: Joomla 5 has just landed minutes ago and is available for all to upgrade to.
What's in it?
No need to re-hash the Joomla.org announcement, you can read all the details there. Joomla 5 has a lot of internal, technical changes and improvements as well as new features. Let's mention:
Admin template dark mode
Some Structured data generation
Performance improvements
AVIF file format support (for more efficient images)
