I have a joomla 2.5 website with more than 800 articles. I use Pagination with 10 articles in a page. so 80 Different Pages in the front page layout has the same title tag. so in Google webmaster tools it is showing it as duplicate content. I heard i should use rel=canonical tag to avoid it. But i don’t know how to use it in joomla sites. Can any one help me please.
To add the rel=canonical tag automatically, the best way for you to use Joomla extension. sh404sef is a great solution for all URL matters and it’s worth to buy. But if you only want a free Joomla extension to add rel=canonical tag, you can use SEO Canonicalisation Plugin http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/site-management/seo-a-metadata/url-canonicalization-/5355. Simple to install and easy to use.
Unfortunately the described plugin is no longer available (“This extension has been unpublished for the following reason: UR5-Per Developer Request”).
So i decided to write a small script to set the canonical tag fast and easy. It isn’t a perfect solution but in think in most cases it does what it has to do
In i a few sentences: i use the article id to get the seo url. This works fine. If there is no article id, e.g. if a form from any extension is displayed, the script does nothing => no setting is better than a wrong setting