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Hello,
I've installed and set up 4SEO on my Joomla 4 site and set my preferred domain as https://www.example.com.
I just did a site check at Seobility and they say many of my primary domain redirects are failing. I assumed this was being handled when I specified my preferred domain - do I have to do something else as well to make these work?
Thank you,
David
Hi
- Screenshot 1: Redirect from non-www to www
I assumed this was being handled when I specified my preferred domain
Only if you enable the corresponding setting:
and of course only for Joomla pages, not other files or images.
- Screenshot 2: /index.php to /
This is incorrect and there should not be any such redirect as it will cause errors in some Joomla extensions. 4SEO correctly handles this by adding a canonical link to pages with /index.php. However, in the case of, for instance: https://www.example.com/index.php, an incorrect canonical is added to your page:
This canonical is added by another extension, or your template, not by 4SEO. I encourage you to get rid of any "canonical" plugin you may be using, or any other canonical-related feature you may be using. Although this is not a really significant issue, it's still better to fix it.
- Screenshot 3: this is the robots.txt file.
1/ This has exactly zero importance (typical example of what many SEO tools do, useless warnings and errors)
2/ The robots.txt file is rendered by your webserver, not Joomla. It is literrally a file on your server hard disk drive. So Joomla can't redirect anything there. If you want to spend time on this, you can add a redirect for anything without-www to to www in your .htaccess file. That will have an effect on real files such as robots.txt.
Best regards
Yannick Gaultier
weeblr.com / @weeblr
Thank you Yannick,
I don't know how I overlooked the first one. Perhaps because I set the domain when I first installed I assumed I had done this completely and didn't notice this YES/NO button when I went through the pages. Sorry about that.
I'll have a look for that other canonical setting.
And thank you for the reassurance about the robots.txt.
Much appreciated. 4SEO seems to be a great program!
Best wishes, David
So could issue number 2 - the extra canonical URLs - be due to having Joomla SEF URLs switched on in global configuration?
I switched it off and it broke a lot of page links.... So I've switched it back on again - for now.
Hi
I don't know how I overlooked the first one. Perhaps because I set the domain when I first installed I assumed I had done this completely and didn't notice this YES/NO button when I went through the pages. Sorry about that.
It is off by default because redirects are often done throught .htaccess file, and Joomla already does the http/https one so there's no need for additional config - again, Joomla as well only does redirects for Joomla pages, not for actual files.
So could issue number 2 - the extra canonical URLs - be due to having Joomla SEF URLs switched on in global configuration?
You must have SEF URLs enabled, this is not related to inserting canonical links into pages. Except that the Joomla SEF URL system plugin has an odd feature whereby if you enter anything into the "Domain" field of its settings, it will indeed generate a canonical. Except fo course the canonical is nearly always wrong.
So what you should do is ensure that there's nothing entered in the Domain option of the Joomla SEF system plugin. If that's empty already, or the canonical is still there are after you cleared that field, then something else on your site is adding it.
Best regards
Yannick Gaultier
weeblr.com / @weeblr
