DJ-Canonical (beta) - the new free plugin

Meet the new plugin we have decided to share with the community - DJ-Canonical (beta). This plugin can help you with SEO.

The history of this plugin is quite simple - one of our clients needed a solution to meet the requirements of the SEO agency that required a canonical link on each page.

According to Wikipedia:

A canonical link element is an HTML element that helps webmasters prevent duplicate content issues in search engine optimization by specifying the "canonical" or "preferred" version of a web page.

A major problem for search engines is to determine the original source for documents that are available on multiple URLs.

In other words - if your website is available from multiple URLs (addresses) - the canonical link will tell the search engine which one is preferred and which one should be indexed.

The plugin can help to show to search engine the preferred URL in such situations:

• your website is available from multiple domains (for example .com and .eu)
• your website is available both with www and without it
• your site is available both with HTTP and HTTPS

How to install and configure it?

1. download and install the plugin
2. navigate to Extensions -> Plugins in your Joomla backend and find DJ-Canonical plugin
3. set the status of the plugin to "Enabled."
4. set the ordering to be last
5. set the default URL (should look like this: https://yourdomainhere.com/)
6. Save and Close

How to check if it works?

Now when you reload your website and check its source, you should see:

<link href="https://yourdomainhere.com/" rel="canonical" />

and even if your website is available from addresses like:

• http://yourdomainhere.com/
• https://www.yourdomainhere.com/
• https://yourdomainhere.eu/

the rel="canonical" will be there and always tell search engines that https://yourdomainhere.com/ is the original document.

Where to get DJ-Canonical?

DJ-Canonical is a free plugin and you can download it from here: DJ-Canonical (beta) (5.56 kB 2020-04-21 13:19:14) 

Please note: We're aware that this plugin is a straightforward solution that does not cover all the scenarios that can happen.
Please share your feedback and tell us if this is something you find useful and if we should work further on developing this plugin. If so - let us know your ideas and requirements. Just post your ideas on our DJ-Canonical Community Forum.