Joomla规范到404

Question

My question is:

If the <link href="" rel="canonical"> points to a 404 page, how does it affect the SEO?

Joomla was great in the past, now it seems to have a serious problems.

After I replaced my old static HTML/PHP site with Joomla it killed me. The visitors dropped from 150 to 5 per a day.

With a lot of Duplicate title & description tags, wrong canonical tags and many other problems :(

Somehow after several days I managed to find and modify a plugin and get a kind of a canonical tags to my articles.

Now I still have sets of "only" 2 pages with a duplicate content.

The first one is fine and correct, the second one gives a wrong canonical tag.

Answer 1

I will answer your first question "Does canonical links points to 404 affects SEO?"

In general 404 is a healthy respond code for the SEO but i will affect the UX and make the users get out of your website like what exactly happen with you.

When you use canonical links, you tell Google "ignore this page and follow the canonical one" and if you point to 404 Google will index this page.

Try to use any other plugin, try to redirect the 404 pages to any other page like the homepage, and if you didn't find a plugin for it you can make it manually from the .htaccess file.