Joomla Duplicate Content Issue
Joomla, like most if not all content management systems, creates duplicate content management issues. The sh404sef plugin alleviates some of these issues, but not all.
A primary source of duplicate content woe in Joomla is when you publish the PDF and Print icons on pages. You see Google will index the page the PDF and Printer icons link to as well, and what you don’t want happening is your pdfs ranking above your page content, which can happen with sites with little authority in Google.
Your best option is to un-publish the print and pdf options in Joomla, and just prevent this happening. You want all your Google juice circulating around your website pages, not PDFs that are just mirrors of a page anyway. It’s 2008 – let people print and make their own PDFs from their browsers.
Installing Extra Components
I have seen a 50 page website have over 4000 pages indexed by Google, all caused by a calendar component a client installed in the site. This can’t be doing the site any good, and Google won’t thank you for it.
A website top heavy with duplicate content isn’t going to do a new site any favours.
Ensure you’ve researched the Joomla components which make their own pages, like calendars – try and pick an extension that has been built with Google in mind, with nofollow, no index options on blank pages, or robot.txt this component out alltogether so Google leaves these pages alone.
You should also consider specifying your canonical domain in your htaccess file or deploying a canonical meta tag if you know what you are doing….
Related Joomla tutorials:
Hmm, I haven’t used Joomla in a long time. I’ll have to look into again, because this article made me curious about the SEO side of this CMS.