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Main address of the site

It is possible that your site is accessed through multiple URLs, such as with or without a leading www prefix for instance, or possibly several domains.

This is not optimal from an SEO standpoint and 4SEO can help ensure all content is accessed under one single address, called the canonical address or URL.

Using the Pages | Settings | Website home address option, make sure 4SEO properly identified the desired main address. This is extrememy important when:

  • 4SEO craws the site to analyze it
  • 4SEO determines if a page is canonical or not and many other important factors

Update site address when you move your site

Each time you move a site between 2 addresses, for instance from your local computer or a test location to the real, live site, make sure to always update immediately the main address in 4SEO settings. Otherwise, 4SEO will not be able to properly analyze your site, resulting in improper decisions and possibly incorrect canonical tags being added, or pages being removed from the sitemap for instance.

Pay attention to the scheme - http:// vs https:// - and whether your site uses a www prefix or not. Using HTTPS is what you should be doing. Using www or not does not really matter as long as you are consistent and always use the same site address.

Options

  • Always redirect to site main address If a request comes from another address than the main address entered above, 4SEO will do a 301 redirect to the main address. This is off by default and should likely stay like that unless you have a very good reason to use it.
  • Always redirect to lowercase URLs If a request comes for an address with uppercase letters, 4SEO will do a 301 redirect to the lowercase version of the URL. This is disabled by default and only really useful if using Joomla native SEF URLs, which does not properly handle case sensitivity in URLs. You do not need this if using 4SEF (or sh404SEF) which handles case sensitivity properly - and it will have no effect anyway in that case.

As 4SEO discovers all pages on your site, it will encounter something that happens on most Joomla site: duplicate content.

Duplicate content is not the best term actually as it does not refer to content being duplicated but rather the same content being accessible using multiple addresses.

Common examples are links found on a site going sometimes to:

  • /some-page
  • /some-page/
  • /Some-Page

Joomla will most likely display the same content in each case but for a search engine, those are 3 different pages and it's not the best thing to have as all ranking signals may be split or lost between pages. Search engines usually deal pretty well with this situation nowadays but not always.

In most cases, 4SEO can automatically recognize this situation and insert invisible canonical links inside of your pages when such a situation is detected. Following our previous example, 4SEO will insert a canonical link to /some-page on all three pages, making sure search engines are aware that /some-page is the real, "main" address of that content.

In cases where this automated detection does not provide expected results, you can manually provide a canonical tag for any page found on the Pages list.

Meta data

4SEO can automatically compute a description meta tag for you in case none exists already on the page. This can help in cases where you have a lot of pages but cannot dedicate the time and resource to manually craft descriptions.

4SEO will try to build a description based on the page content. This is automated work so we always recommend to manually write description if a meta description is important to you.

When building that description, 4SEO will aim for a specific description length (of 160 characters by default), which you can change to your preferred value here.

Note that this is only a target, the actual character count may differ slightly.