#4397 – switched to https, but want to set canonical to http

Hi

sh404SEF does not handle the domain (or scheme: http vs https) of your site. This is done entirely by Joomla, we only take care of URLs from the first "/".
Joomla lets you select your canonical domain in the settings of the SEF system plugin, so that's where you want to go to globally change your canonical to something else than the real site.

I would however 100% advise against this, it will most certainly have a very negative effect on your SEO: you are creating a redirect loop when doing this: Your site is served over https, but you insert a canonical to the HTTP version. But when ones (and Google) go to the HTTP version, they are 301 redirected to the HTTPS version. So which one should search engine use?
They don't know, and so they might choose one or the other. You may be able to fix that by selecting HTTPS in Google Search console, but this goes against every SEO principle.

I would instead:

1 - Just forget about the old articles item counts. Many sites actually remove those counts, you never know if they have a positive or negative impact.
2 - If you insist on having those for your old articles, pre-switching to HTTPS, you will have to work on it and use one of sh404SEF hooks to modify the URL included in the OGP tags that Facebook use. This would be something like that:

<?php
/**
 * sh404SEF hooks file
 */

defined('_JEXEC') or die();

function t4397CustomTags($tags)
{
	$app = JFActory::getApplication();
	$option = $app->input->getCmd('option');
	$view = $app->input->getCmd('view');
	$id = $app->input->getCmd('id');
	if ('com_content' == $option && 'article' == $view)
	{
		$tags['url'] = str_replace('https://', 'http://', $tags['url']);
	}
	return $tags;
}

ShlHook::add(
	'sh404sef_ogp_tags',
	't4397CustomTags'
);

This code should be placed in a file called "sh404sef_functions.php", located in the "/libraries/weeblr" folder.

This is a simplified example. I would suggest you make it a bit smarter and only set back the URL to HTTP instead of HTTPS for articles older than a certain date, so that newer articles are assigned to their HTTPS URL. And of course it should be adjusted if this is not about com_content.

Rgds

Hi

If you put the http url in the og tags, you don't need anything else really. Google would certainly penalize you for having a specific redirect for them, but I think Facebook would not mind.

As you are only using other plugins for your OGP tags, there's not much to add from us I think, except maybe that if you were to use sh404SEF OG tags generation, you would:

- get a default image
- easily run your own custom code, as shown above, without having to modify a plugin (which means no update allowed, or you'll have to redo your changes) The code above will survive any sh404SEF update.

Rgds

Hi

Not sure what you mean by a "default" image now. A default image is what you use when no image is found in the article itself (ie automatic detection cannot find any suitable image).

Automatic detection first look at intro or full article images presence. Then if not found, it scans the article content for an image (larger than Facebook minimal size). You can select to use either the 1st image found in content, or the largest image in content. Then if nothing is found in content, sh404SEF will search the full page content for a suitable image. If nothing found, it will resort to the default image set in configuration. Of course, you can also set a specific image for each URL.

Rgds

Hi

That would be achieved in sh404SEF by setting the default image in configuration, and then picking a specific image for a given page, in the URL manager. That way you do not have to change the layout for articles depending on whether they have an intro image or not.

And as outlined before, it can also be done programmatically for instance. sh404SEF has been around a while, it's fairly flexible.

Up to you/your customer anyway.

Rgds