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look at the URLs below:

1. /essays/technical-essays/180-technologies/247-megapixel
2. /essays/technical-essays/247-megapixel
3. /essays/technical-essays/technologies/247-megapixel
4. /essays/technical-essays/technologies/247-

the right URL is the third one. but the product page shows up with other three URLs. notice that the forth URL is incorrect and incomplete and an 404 error should be thrown. there are a lot of articles like this reported on google console as "duplicate title tag". this means google has found these as separate pages.

in Joomla there is no where to assign canonical tag for articles to solve duplicate content issue. is there any solution to solve this?

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  • That 4th URL would still be right. If I am not mistaken the default router for articles breaks apart the string which is queried and uses the numeric ID portion of the query as the ID of the article in question. It appears that 247 is the ID for your megapixel article, therefore it is actually correct even though the article title is not passed.
    – Terry Carter ♦
    Jan 3, 2018 at 23:26
  • And yes, you should be using canonical tags to direct search engines to the preferred URL for you article.
    – Terry Carter ♦
    Jan 3, 2018 at 23:27
  • thanks for answering. but how can i set canonical tag for an article? there is no where to set this in joomla back-end. do i have to install an extension to do so? if yes, name one. i installed "sh404sef" but it changes the URLs completely. i only want to set canonical tags or make disappear other URLs. @Terry Carter
    – kiasaty
    Jan 4, 2018 at 5:11
  • Look at the module Flexi Custom Code. You can add the PHP in the module to strip the default canonical and apply your own custom canonical easily enough
    – Terry Carter ♦
    Jan 4, 2018 at 6:30
  • Let me add that it's not just you. The Joomla router has traditionally tried to route anything it could which 5% of the time (in my experience) leads to Google picking up garbage urls and going nuts with them. I've never seen a nice sane solution provided by a 3rd party plugin.
    – jamesgarrett
    Jan 4, 2018 at 8:00

2 Answers 2

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After a lot of searching i found a good solution to solve Joomla article's canonical tag problem.

I solve this issue using Joomla custom fields. see this article to learn how to do it: https://www.robertwent.com/blog/using-joomla-custom-fields-add-canonical-urls/

you can also read this for more information about this issue: https://joomlaseo.com/blog/joomla-3-and-canonical-url

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  • I wrote that post as a request from a comment on another post. Whilst it will work, I don't think it's a very maintainable solution in the long run (not for large sites anyway). Hopefully, J4 will fix it.
    – Robert Went
    Jun 18, 2018 at 22:35
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in Joomla there is no where to assign canonical tag for articles to solve duplicate content issue. is there any solution to solve this?

Add your main URL (site domain) into the System SEF plugin and Joomla will add a canonical url tag

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