SEO Step-by-Step Guide– 197. Joomla and Content Duplication Issues

Joomla undoubtedly offers an excellent CMS solution. It is by far the most powerful CMS we have and it is very flexible in terms of getting it do what you exactly want and also in terms of getting the perfect design appeal. However, there is one common complaint that comes from Joomla users. Joomla has content duplication issues and is not search engine friendly.

What do we mean here? It simply means that the same content can be accessed through multiple URLs and for search engine bots; these are multiple versions of the same page. You will be able to see this clearly by making the following search in Google: “site:yourdomainname.com” you should replace yourdomainname.com with your website name. This will list the pages that are already in Google’s index and you will be able to see that the number of pages indexed by Google is much higher than the actual number of pages in your website. This is a clear indicator of duplicate pages in Google’s index.

You can over come this problem by taking a few simple precautions. Joomla comes with a number of built in tools and modules and we don’t need a number of built in features such as PDF button, print button, etc for a standard website. What Joomla does is to create a new page whenever you click the print button with the same content. This will not only be accessed by the users but also by search engine bots. You can conveniently remove the print button on your website and the same applies to the PDF button as well.

There are few other features that you can turn off in Joomla safely without affecting the functionality of your website and at the same time, work with the duplicate content issue. Few such options include, read more, linkable title, intro text, linkable section, linkable category all these things simply duplicates your content in multiple ways. This is not controlled by the SEF feature. When you choose the SEF feature, it just makes your URLs more reader friendly and search engine friendly. This feature alone does not make your website search engine friendly. There many other factors those contribute for the search engine friendliness of your website and one of them is avoiding duplicate content.

If you really need to have “Read more” button, create two pages with different URLs and link manually at the bottom of the page where you want to take your readers to more information. These finer aspects of Joomla optimization are often forgotten and websites get into hot waters unnecessarily. If used prudently, you can get the most out of your Joomla website.

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