Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
How to Remove Joomla Canonical and Duplicate Page Content
-
I've attempted to follow advice from the Q&A section.
Currently on the site www.cherrycreekspine.com, I've edited the .htaccess file to help with 301s - all pages redirect to www.cherrycreekspine.com.
Secondly, I'd added the canonical statement in the header of the web pages.
I have cut the Duplicate Page Content in half ... now I have a remaining 40 pages to fix up.
This is my practice site to try and understand what SEOmoz can do for me.
I've looked at some of your videos on Youtube ... I feel like I'm scrambling around to the Q&A and the internet to understand this product. I'm reading the beginners guide.... any other resources would be helpful.
-
Hi Todd,
Oh no, looks like all your canonicals are pointing towards the homepage....
<link rel="<a class="attribute-value">canonical</a>" href="[http://www.cherrycreekspine.com<](view-source:http://www.cherrycreekspine.com%3C/)"/>Also looks like there's an extra carrot "<" at the end of the URL. Looks like it's coming from the wonky code.
Regardless, this isn't what you want. This basically tells search engines that every page is a canonical of the homepage - and that all these other pages aren't important on their own. It's likely search engines will start to drop these pages out of their index unless this tag is removed immediately. Reminds me of Dr. Pete's canonical nightmares.
In short... remove that canonical ASAP. It's probably better to have some duplicate content than a sitewide canonical that points to your homepage.
Have you tried the Joomla Canonicalisation Plugin? Haven't tried it myself, but it might be smidgen easier than trying to code the php yourself. You can find it here: http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/site-management/seo-a-metadata/url-canonicalization-/5355
My guess is you can completely remove whatever manual canonical code you wrote, and the plugin will take care of the rest.
Remember, when the code is working properly, each page with point to itself (without extra parameters and so on) the way a proper canonical should.
Best of luck!
-
View page source shows HTML. If I can't see the PHP file i.e. which generates the HTML it's impossible for me to know how. I'm not very clear on this. You can PM the file to me if you want - but don't send me any passwords please.

-
Yikes... so, I checked the template html file and all including PHP info is there...
View page source did not show all the code.
So, still stuck.
-
Hold on .... not all the copy was properly entered by me... I'll fix and retest.
-
Mr., I replaced the line in the html but no change. I'm completely new to this, so please forgive me. All of these concepts are new to me.
Any other thoughts or direction? I looked at one of the Whiteboard videos... buy over my head.
Thanks in advance... Todd
-
You need to code it again:
In the HTML I can see on Line 15:
rel="canonical" href="http://www.cherrycreekspine.com<?php echo parse_url($canonical, PHP_URL_PATH); ?>"/>
You need to write everything after href="
and before "/>
in php; probably:
<link rel="canonical" href="<?php echo="" '<a="" class=" " href="http://www.cherrycreekspine.com%26lt%3B/?php%20echo%20parse_url($canonical,%20PHP_URL_PATH);%20?%3E" target="_blank">http://www.cherrycreekspine.com<'.parse_url($canonical, PHP_URL_PATH); ?>"/></link rel="canonical" href="<?php>
If it doesnt sort it, post again and I'll try to help you further.
Also, you either apply canonical values or remove duplicate content (the post title is slightly confused, I think)

Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Rel canonical tag from shopify page to wordpress site page
We have pages on our shopify site example - https://shop.example.com/collections/cast-aluminum-plaques/products/cast-aluminum-address-plaque That we want to put a rel canonical tag on to direct to our wordpress site page - https://www.example.com/aluminum-plaques/ We have links form the wordpress page to the shop page, and over time ahve found that google has ranked the shop pages over the wp pages, which we do not want. So we want to put rel canonical tags on the shop pages to say the wp page is the authority. I hope that makes sense, and I would appreciate your feeback and best solution. Thanks! Is that possible?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | shabbirmoosa0 -
Is it best practice to have a canonical tags on all pages
The website I'm working on has no canonical tags. There is duplicate content so rel=canonicals need adding to certain pages but is it best practice to have a tag on every page ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ColesNathan0 -
SEM Rush & Duplicate content
Hi SEMRush is flagging these pages as having duplicate content, but we have rel = next etc implemented: https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/brand/bott https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/brand/bott?page=2 Or is it being flagged as they're just really similar pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
Duplicate content on recruitment website
Hi everyone, It seems that Panda 4.2 has hit some industries more than others. I just started working on a website, that has no manual action, but the organic traffic has dropped massively in the last few months. Their external linking profile seems to be fine, but I suspect usability issues, especially the duplication may be the reason. The website is a recruitment website in a specific industry only. However, they posts jobs for their clients, that can be very similar, and in the same time they can have 20 jobs with the same title and very similar job descriptions. The website currently have over 200 pages with potential duplicate content. Additionally, these jobs get posted on job portals, with the same content (Happens automatically through a feed). The questions here are: How bad would this be for the website usability, and would it be the reason the traffic went down? Is this the affect of Panda 4.2 that is still rolling What can be done to resolve these issues? Thank you in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iQi0 -
Adding a Canonical Tag to each page referencing itself?
Hey Mozers! I've noticed that on www.Zappos.com they have a Canonical tag on each page referencing it self. I have heard that this is a popular method but I dont see the point in canon tagging a page to its self. Any thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rpaiva0 -
[E-commerce] Duplicate content due to color variations (canonical/indexing)
Hello, We currently have a lot of color variations on multiple products with almost the same content. Even with our canonicals being set, Moz's crawling tool seems to flag them as duplicate content. What we have done so far: Choosing the best-selling color variation (our "master product") Adding a rel="canonical" to every variation (with our "master product" as the canonical URL) In my opinion, it should be enough to address this issue. However, being given the fact that it's flagged as duplicate by Moz, I was wondering if there is something else we should do? Should we add a "noindex,follow" to our child products and "index,follow" to our master product? (sounds to me like such a heavy change) Thank you in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EasyLounge0 -
Is a different location in page title, h1 title, and meta description enough to avoid Duplicate Content concern?
I have a dynamic website which will have location-based internal pages that will have a <title>and <h1> title, and meta description tag that will include the subregion of a city. Each page also will have an 'info' section describing the generic product/service offered which will also include the name of the subregion. The 'specific product/service content will be dynamic but in some cases will be almost identical--ie subregion A may sometimes have the same specific content result as subregion B. Will the difference of just the location put in each of the above tags be enough for me to avoid a Duplicate Content concern?</p></title>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | couponguy0 -
Capitals in url creates duplicate content?
Hey Guys, I had a quick look around however I couldn't find a specific answer to this. Currently, the SEOmoz tools come back and show a heap of duplicate content on my site. And there's a fair bit of it. However, a heap of those errors are relating to random capitals in the urls. for example. "www.website.com.au/Home/information/Stuff" is being treated as duplicate content of "www.website.com.au/home/information/stuff" (Note the difference in capitals). Anyone have any recommendations as to how to fix this server side(keeping in mind it's not practical or possible to fix all of these links) or to tell Google to ignore the capitalisation? Any help is greatly appreciated. LM.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CarlS0