I was reading a Post on Pandia on Duplicate Content on then I realised there are some basic settings in a standard Joomla Installation that create Duplicate Content.
As you look at your standard installation, you will see three icons on every page:
- a PDF Icon to Create a version of the page in PDF format
- a Print Icon to Create a basic version of the page to be printable without the Template settings link Menu and Headers.
- a E-mail icon the send the URL to any email adres.
Turning the Dups off
On the post 10 Things to Do on Joomla you could read how to disable the PDF Option, because they are “Dead-Ends” for you visitors, there are no navigation options in the PDF.
But they are also Duplicate versions of your page, so another reason to disable this in your Glogbal Configuration.
And while you do that, please disable the “Print” function as well… this again is another version of your page.
The E-mail link is fine, because there are no pages generated.
Stick to One SEO Option
Now this one is also Big!
Choose your SEF Component, set the configuration option on how the URL’s are rewritten, and don’t change them after that !!
I did a test with several SEF Components, which did not all have the same options.
The site has no 1430 !! pages indexed in Google… but the site is currently on 91 Content pages..
This means that google will pick the pages they think are most relevant and that might just be the PDF version!
Start now and prevent the Duplicate Content penalty an keep control over your own index pages!!
Related Posts
Is it really necessary to diable the print function? Does this not just make the browers load up the page with linked to a different CSS?
In version 1.5 of Joomla, there is no need to disable PDFs as they have the no follow attribute built into the link, however the print buttons do not have that attribute built in.
So whats your advice, do you recommend disabling the print button on Joomla 1.5 sites then?
From an accessibility point of view and usability point of view, its really nice having a print option!
@David
Yes, please diable the print function, because Joomla does not use a print css file to send the Article to the printer.
Instead it creates a new page without the normal template around it.
Thus creating duplicate content for search engines.
Also for Joomla 1.5 I suggest disabling it, also for the PDF file.
Because a NoFollow is not equil to a NoIndex..
Further more I don’t see any use for a PDF version of a Page…
As for Printing, IE, Firefox and Other Browsers will print you page quit nicely, and If you really want to have a Clean page print, make sure you have a print.css file in you template!
Then you will have a great printing option!
Great answer, thanks so much! So yeah good point, NoFollow not the same as Noindex.
As you suggested, I guess the solution would be to make a clean CSS print template.
Thanks for your help! Before I make a decision what I will do I need to try printing a page of the site!
Thank you!
David
Helloe, 1.3 of sh404sef has the option to do a noindex on pdf and so on..
But I agree, in my early times, I hat dups, too.was a pain to get that out of google!
I’ve had a site up for about three months with those duplicates, how long before they disappear from google? Do they disappear by themselves (or does one have to do something)? and lastly, will the site get some kind of permanent penalty re-page rank?
Thanks for all your great help.
@tekno boy:You have a right 404 error code on pages that are no longer there, so the pages will disseaper over time.
If you want to speed it up a little, you could use Google webmaster tools to remove the page faster.
http://www.google.com/webmasters/
In the Tool section of your website overview you can request removal of each url.
The site will not get any penalty because you are improving your site.
The pages will be removed from Google index by themself, but It can easily take months before youll se the changes.
As suggested you can use Google Webmaster tool to manually remove URLS when they have already been blocked by robots. If you got pages with over 2000 pages indexed like I do, its a lot of work to do so manually.