Simple things to do on Your Joomla site to avoid basic Duplicate Content

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!!