#6806 – Suggestion - Canonicals

Hi

But have you thought of having a button on an sef url page to make the canonical self-referencing. Could even have it as a default setting?

Which purpose would this serve?

Google seems to say it is not critical but is best practice to use self-referencing canonicals if there is no other canonical?

I have not seen anything like this. Canonical are to be used on the other pages, those that could be duplicates of the "main" page.

The problem with canonicals is being sure that you put them in the right place, on the right page. That's why the only time sh404SEF automatically adds a canonical is on the single article view. That's when we know what the actual canonical link is. So basically what you ask is already happening for Joomla articles. For other extensions, I would not really dare add a canonical automatically.

Also, keep in mind that with sh404SEF it's really hard to get any sort of duplicates content on your Joomla site, as we do away with the menu-based routing Joomla uses.

Best regards

Hi

A quote from Google.

That's a blanket statement and as such it's not a something that can, neither should, be applied as is.

As I said above, I would gladly add automatic canonical to all pages. If I could. But there's only one thing worse than Google not picking the right URL amongst several duplicates (which is the only use of canonical), and that is: providing the wrong canonical.

Mueller points at pages being duplicated because they have parameters such as utm=xxx or sort_by=yyy. That's a great use of canonical. However, problem with Joomla and its extensions is that URLs can have parameters:

/cities/europe/paris?detailed=1
vs
/cities/europe/paris?summary=1 for instance

And those 2 pages are entirely different, with different content, etc It'd be wrong to set a canonical to /cities/europe/paris in that case because /cities/europe/paris might be another entirely different page actually.

So we do not do that unless we know exactly the content: for Joomla main view of a single article, sh404SEF adds a self-referencing canonical.

To dig even more, it turns out that Joomla already has an automatic canonical feature (you can use it to force a different domain, for instance www vs no www or http vs https or even an entirely different domain). It's now a little bit better but for a long time (like only a few months ago), it would force a canonical on all pages with a query string (?param=xxx in the URL) by simply stripping the query string.
This was so bad and got the wrong canonical so often that we added a feature to always remove Joomla canonical from all pages.

Having a canonical is fine, even if not useful, getting the right one automatically is very hard, getting the wrong one is very easy and usually disastrous consequences.

Best regards

Hi

You're welcome! The issue here is that all this information is correct but needs to be evaluated against each case specifics, and that's kinda hard to do without getting into very much details. WIth respect to canonicals, if there's one rule I follow it's that it's better to not use a canonical and let search engines sort out the (possible) mess than using canonicals incorrectly. The other rule is to avoid the mess in the first place :)

Closing this ticket now, feel free to open a new one as needed. If you do so, please mention this ticket number in the new one.

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Best regards