In this tutorial, we will explore what a canonical URL is, why you need to use it, and how to add canonical URLs on Joomla Gridbox based websites.
Any website page, created on Joomla or any other CMS, can include additional variations of links. Links from advertising campaigns with UTM parameters, social networks can add their own parameters to links ending, and each CMS generates its own system link for each page.
Here are examples:
• https://www.domain.com/page
• https://www.domain.com/index.php?option=com_gridbox&id=1
• https://www.domain.com/page?fbclid=1
• https://www.domain.com/page?utm_source=blog&utm_medium=mail
All these links open the same page with absolutely the same content. But, search crawlers index these links as unique and want to see unique pages with their own content for each link. As a result, you get alerts about duplicate content in the webmaster tool. Also, in search results, can be displayed, not the original user-friendly URL.
All of this has a bad impact on your Joomla site's SEO. And to solve issues with duplicates, webmasters use canonical URL annotations.
Joomla website builder Gridbox comes with the built-in canonical URLs app that allows you to add rel=”canonical” annotation to page URLs on your Joomla website. This guide covers installing one of
Joomla SEO tools — the canonical URLs app and configuring it in Gridbox.
