In previous blog posts, I’ve talked about how Joomla can create lots of duplicate content pages and wreak havoc with your Search Engine rankings. Today, we’ll deal with a major culprit.
One Joomla’s major causes of duplicate content is the PDF generator. Brian Teeman has even pointed out that when he does his in-depth searches for Joomla Weekly News, he finds many PDF pages ranking higher than the original pages.
The problem is so bad, and the PDF so useless, that if you check the demo of Joomla 1.5, you’ll see that its about to be dropped. For those of us running the current version of Joomla, what do we do to avoid Joomla PDF hell?
- Unpublish the PDFs completely.
- Use robots.txt to stop Google from picking up the PDF pages.
- A very simple, but useful tip from XTraze.net. He suggests simply adding a "no-follow" to the PDF links. No-follow is often used by sites that suffer heavy spam attacks or have lots of extra pages that can reduce the value of their site as a whole.
Open up /components/com_content/content.html.php
<a href="<?php echo $link; ?>" target="_blank" onclick="window.open(’<?php echo $link; ?>’,’win2′,’<?php echo $status; ?>’); return false;" title="<?php echo _CMN_PDF;?>">>
Add the rel=”nofollow” attribute:
<a href="<?php echo $link; ?>" rel="nofollow" target="_blank" onclick="window.open(’<?php echo $link; ?>’,’win2′,’<?php echo $status; ?>’); return false;" title="<?php echo _CMN_PDF;?>">>