One of the most important things to remember when managing SEO on your Joomla site is that duplicate content can easily become a problem. Its easy to have many different URLs pointing to the same page. Fortunately, some Search Engine Friendly URL extensions use a feature called “automapping“. Today, I’ll explain what that is.
As an example, lets take a site we’re currently building for a local lake in the Atlanta area: www.lakeallatoona.info. The site has little information currently but it servers as a good example.
We’re using the sh404SEF to create the Search Engine Friendly URLs.
Lets take the forum as an example. By opening up the menu link to the forum, we can see that the normal link to the forum is:
http://www.lakeallatoona.info/index.php?option=com_fireboard&Itemid=32
Pretty ugly, I’m sure you’d agree. Fortunately, with sh404SEF, we can turn that into a much bettter URL:
http://www.lakeallatoona.info/forum.html
This is where is gets good. With normal Joomla default SEF URLs, or an SEF URL component that doesn’t have automapping, we’d still be able to access both URLs – the good or the bad one. This leaves open the possibility for duplicate content to be created.
With automapping enabled, the ugly URL redirects to the beautiful URL. Duplicate content problem solved.