#6398 – Joomla Duplicate Content Probs

Hi

It all depends on why you have such pages in Google. For instance, /de/88-slideshow.html is a valid URL, it returns some content, etc
- what is the canonical URL for this page?
- Where did Google found a link to this page?

Not sure what a canonical plugin can do about that, the problem is to automatically find the canonical URL for a page, and I'm not aware of any plugin that can do that. Even sh404SEF can do it automatically only in a limited number of cases (what we do is actually prevent duplicate URLs to appear in the first case). You'll be able to add canonical manually on any URL of course, but it's only useful if the problem is small, ie you only have a limited number of such URLs (and if you have a limited number of such URLs, then just don't bother, Google will sort it out).

So the real question is how do they found those URLs?

You can probably have that fixed by sh404SEF, which will not create multiple URLs for the same page, but then some of your URLs may/will change from the existing, already indexed ones. So you will have to handle that as well, through redirects or manual customization of the URLs to match the old ones.

Rgds

Hi

I want to get rif of for example: https://www.patlector-patentanwalt.net/de/95-patentanwalt.html">https://www.patlector-patentanwalt.net/de/95-patentanwalt.html

And it's hard to get rid of them entirely if you don't know where they come from. Where did Google found them on your site.

Yes, using sh404SEF, if such a URL is requested by Google, they'll get a 404 because it doesn't exist, while with Joomla SEF it will try desparately to display something. In your example, Joomla SEF will see the article id 93, and display that article. That's a problem you won't have with sh404SEF.


Rgds

Hi

I dont know what you mean by "where".

Google can only index what it finds on your site, it cannot "invent" a URL such as https://www.patlector-patentanwalt.net/de/93-designschutz.html.

Search engines crawl your site (ie read your home page, search for all links on it, then read each of these links, looking also for more links, and so on) to find pages. If Google indexed /de/93-designschutz.html, it means somewhere on your site, or maybe on somebody else's site, or in an RSS feed, etc, this link exists and Google found it.
Then another problem is that when Google tried to read the content of this page, Joomla accepted it and returned a valid page content. But again, the initial problem is that the link exists somewhere and Google could find it.

there is no article with ID 88! Joomla generates it because I use a slideshow module.

There you found the source of all your issues. It's not Joomla. It's your slideshow module generating bad links.

Will your extension help me here?

Cannot answer to that, because obviously the problem is in your slideshow module, creating bad links.

Rgds

Hi

I don't know. It depends on how broken your slideshow is and why it generates bad links.

If it follows Joomla API and passes URLs to sh404SEF, then we can do a better job than the Joomla SEF.

If it only generates them directly, there is nothing we can do.

Even if you do not fix the problem in your slideshow, sh404SEF can still help you as it will 404 any URL not in the database, but again it all depends on what your slideshow is doing.

Rgds

Hi

I dont think that there is an internal or external link for https://www.patlector-patentanwalt.net/de/93-designschutz.html

If Google found it, then there is a public link to this page on the internet. Whether on your site or elsewhere.

I think the only reason ist that Joomla generates those URLs as widely known because there is the category with ID 93.

Joomla generate URLs to display them (essentially). Google can only index a URL it finds somewhere on a web page.

The only way this sort of things actually happen usually is if that link is found on a search result page (Google bot often performs searches on your site, to find new links).

Searching for designschutz on your site does return the category link as the first result, but the link is https://www.patlector-patentanwalt.net/de/component/content/category/93-designschutz.html, so that's not it. Note that the search also returns what seems more bad links.

Anyway, at this stage we both have to move forward, so I would say in conclusion that indeed sh404SEF will do a better job and most likely avoid most of this mess. There is no guarantee, because you are running extension/template that's not doing what it should, and the only real thing you can do is give it a go. As mentioned earlier, installing sh404SEF will likely change some of your URLs, so you will have to deal with it either by adding redirects or manually customizing the URLs that may be different to match the old ones.

Rgds