Duplicate content is the silent killer of your Joomla site’s SEO, confusing search engines and tanking your rankings. System - Link Canonical is a free, battle-tested plugin that puts an end to that nonsense by auto-generating canonical URLs for your front-end HTML pages. It slaps <link rel="canonical"> tags in the <head> and HTTP headers, with built-in fixes for Joomla core components (com_content, com_contact, com_users) and third-party heavyweights (com_k2, com_ars). Configure it to enforce https, redirect to clean URLs, or ignore pesky components, and extend it with custom fixes for any component.
How It Works
Without canonical URLs, search engines see index.php?option=com_content&id=123 and /article-title as duplicate pages, splitting your link equity and hurting your rankings. System - Link Canonical fixes that by generating a single, SEO-friendly URL for each page, like https://yourdomain.com/article-title. It uses Joomla’s SEF routing and component-specific fixes (e.g., for com_content, com_k2) to ensure clean URLs. Got a custom component? Write your own fix with our documentation - it's super easy. You can override any existing link tag, force http or https, and even redirect users to the canonical URL. Misbehaving URLs? Just create a fix (or contract RicheyWeb to do it for you.)
v5.0.19
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Unrivaled SEO Protection, Proven Results
Duplicate content is a real problem—search engines hate it, and it kills your site’s visibility. System - Link Canonical ensures every page points to one URL, consolidating your SEO juice. Check the logs on any Joomla site: multiple URLs for the same content (e.g., with/without Itemid or lang) are common. This plugin stops that chaos, supporting core components like com_content, com_contact, com_users, com_finder, com_newsfeeds, com_tags, com_weblinks, and third-party ones like com_k2 and com_ars. Extensible for any component, it’s been fine-tuned for Joomla 5 to keep your site lean and mean.
RicheyWeb.com and Carry Texas have been running this plugin for months to test against real-world traffic and spiders with wildly successful results. For Carry Texas, there is a single additional fix implemented for the gun show listings component.
- Where a component fix is present, this plugin replaces the existing Joomla-generated link.
- Where no fix is present, the original Joomla link remains in place.
- Modified <link> elements contain a data attribute indicating that the plugin has acted upon it: data-asset-name="System - Link Canonical"
Why Choose System - Link Canonical?
This plugin exists to make your Joomla site’s URLs bulletproof for search engines, with zero cost and maximum flexibility.
Features
- Automatic canonical URL generation for front-end HTML pages
- Built-in fixes for Joomla core components (com_content, com_contact, com_finder, com_newsfeeds, com_tags, com_users, and com_weblinks) and a few 3rd party components that I use regularly (com_k2 and com_ars)
- Custom scheme (http, https, or current) and host configuration
- Optional redirects to canonical URLs
- Override existing <link rel="canonical"> tags
- Ignore specific components (e.g., com_admin)
- HTTP header support for Link: <canonical_url>; rel=canonical
- Extensible with custom fix files via included documentation
Why let canonical URLs stress you out when System - Link Canonical makes them so easy?
Download the Plugin
System - Link Canonical 5.0.190
