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.)

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"

Pagination Support with rel="next" and rel="prev"

Got paginated lists like https://yourdomain.com/content-tags/plugin?start=140? The latest System - Link Canonical update supercharges your SEO with smarter pagination handling. Now, each paginated page gets a unique, self-referential canonical URL to align with Google’s guidelines, ensuring every page is indexable as a distinct resource. We’ve kept rel="next" and rel="prev" tags (e.g., ) to guide crawlers like Bing through your sequence. This prevents Google from picking wrong canonicals, enables proper indexing, and enhances crawl efficiency—perfect for Joomla blogs, e-commerce, or any site with paginated content.

Out of the box, pagination is supported in ALL of the Joomla core components. Any extension that implements Joomla categories can implement prev/next support into their fix with just 2 lines of code.

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.

Deliver Consistent Canonical URLs

Stop relying on plugins and extensions that are KNOWN to produce faulty canonical URLS!

Stop Negative SEO via URL Parameter Abuse

Malicious actors can harm your Joomla site’s rankings by adding junk query parameters (e.g., ?spam=123) to URLs, causing duplicate content issues that confuse Google. System - Link Canonical prevents this by generating clean, SEO-friendly canonical URLs, stripping irrelevant parameters while keeping your site fast. Read more about Negative SEO via URL Parameter Abuse in Joomla.

Features

• Automatic canonical URL generation for front-end HTML pages
  • canonical as defined in RFC 6596
• Automatic prev/next link tags for some search engines
  • prev|next as defined in RFC 5988
• Built-in fixes for Joomla core components:
  • com_content, com_contact, com_finder, com_newsfeeds, com_tags, com_users, and com_weblinks
• Fixes for 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 tags
• Ignore specific components (e.g., com_admin)
• HTTP header support for Link:
  • canonical as defined in RFC 9596
  • prev|next as defined in RFC 5988
• Core Joomla Caching to reduce Time-To-First-Byte (Core Web Vitals)
• Trailing slash removal (and trailing /index.php removal) to prevent duplicate content penalties.
• RSS and Atom feeds are given a canonical link HTTP header.
  • This eliminates GSC "Duplicate without user-selected canonical" for feed items.
• Extensible with custom fix files via included documentation

Why let canonical URLs stress you out when System - Link Canonical makes them so easy?