How to Use Rel=canonical tag in Joomla 2.5 website? Please help

Hello Everyone

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.

I found a tutorial on using canonical in Joomla here, but the resolution requires sh404SEF and another plugin for that.

Another search brought me here to this bit of code to place in your index.php file:

<?php
$canonicalLink =  "http://".$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'].$_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"];
?>
<link rel="canonical" href="<?php echo($canonicalLink); ?>"> 

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Unfortunately the described plugin is no longer available (“This extension has been unpublished for the following reason: UR5-Per Developer Request”).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 :slight_smile:

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 :wink:

Download link and more infos can be found here:

http://www.concept-br.de/blog/canonical-tag-for-joomla/

Hope this helps!