Not sure how I can solve this, as documentation seems very sparse, and the community for K2 / Joomla doesn't seem to be anywhere near as large as Wordpress does.

Saying that, hopefully there's a simple way to solve my issues! I appreciate all kinds of help!

I'm trying to SEO optimise my website, using SEO Screaming Frog to show all missing/duplicated titles and meta descriptions.

Firstly, I've noticed that the pagination links at the bottom of the page generated by K2, are creating URL parameters to show different items on the page. These are going to /itemlist?start=4 etc. How can I make this appear SEO friendly like /page/2/ etc?

Next, to get rid of the duplicate meta tag descriptions, I'd like to append the page numbering to the end of the meta description and title tags. CAn I do this dynamically somehow?

Lastly, I have some K2 categories assigned to menu items, which give me a structured URL to use. But they also have their own, generated by K2. Can I get rid of these somehow? IT's very messy, and doesn't seem to be anywhere as nice as Wordpress' menu structure.

Hello,

K2 uses Joomla!'s default pagination (eg: check the URLs in joomla.org www.joomla.org/announcements.html?start=6 )

If you want to change the pattern of these URLs to have it /page/number you will need an SEO extension, preferably one which support K2.

Now as for the URLs do the following:
a) Map each category into a separate menu item,
b) Create an empty K2 category menu item (leave the category selection empty) and call it eg: content to have all orphan tags and user render through that menu.

Or, if you decide to use an SEO extension which enforces new URL patterns, make sure it supports K2.

Why do I need a plugin? Doesn't Joomla / K2 have built in support to be able to add pagination to the meta descriptions? I've already installed an SEO plugin, but that requires manually entering every single description for each individual URL.

I Really don't want to have to do that... This is a CMS, there must be an easier way to use placeholders.

You do not need to enter new metadata, adding rel links (prev/next) will solve this issue.
Since you are using an SEO plugin/ extension, I presume it will have this functionality.

Furthermore the pagination is core functionality, K2 does not implement any rules/ functionality of its own.

Hello Lee,

Either of the Manage CMS Canomical Extensions can provide support for rel="prev/next"

I hope this helps,

Joe Campbell

OKay, you'll need to explain to me what's happening here.

Firstly, I'm not going to pay for a plugin to do what should be happening in the first place. This should be core functionality. I'm happy to dive into code, but I'm not just going to be throwing plugins to try and fix things. That's awful.

Secondly, I don't understand the reference to rel="next/prev". What does that mean, and what relevance does it have to my pagination links at the bottom of the page or the meta descriptions for each page? Each URL needs a meta description, and a unique one. Which can be resolved by adding ' - Page #' at the end of the descriptions for page 2 onwards.

This makes no sense at all, I'd appreciate if someone could try explaining why it's not working out of the box.

Joomla! is the CMS and K2 is the extension.
K2 uses core CMS functionality. If you want to change the CMS' functionality you need an extension.

The rel attribute will indicate that a page is a part of an archive and provides the link to the next and previous page.

But that's not going to make any change to the physical URLs of the pagination links at the bottom of the page is it? That's what I want to change.

As I already said, this is core Joomla! functionality, unrelated to K2.
You need an extension in order to change these URLs.

Can I insert a hook or function to my template's function file that will override that part of the core code, and allow me to manually code the links?

You can override the pagination -> docs.joomla.org/Understanding_Output_Overrides#Ancillary_Customisation:Pagination but I do not know if you can also change the URL pattern successfully via an override.

I can't find any extensions that allow this, and there seems to be extremely little documentation or web sites out there that have even touched on this issue.

If you're able to provide some links to extensions that will solve this issue, that aren't paid for, I'd really appreciate it.

I'm still very surprised and disappointed that this simple feature seems to be completely left out of Joomla core functionality. Especially as in the Global Configuration there's a setting to 'Enable SEF URLs' that states:

Search engine friendly (SEF), human-readable or clean URLs are URLs that make sense to both humans and search engines because they explain the path to the particular page they point to.

This option should technically apply to pagination links too, in my opinion.

Thanks for the link, but it doesn't give any information on Pagination, as it says 'We'll look into this later'.

I have to remind you that this is the forum for K2.
For core Joomla! issues you have to address them on Joomla!'s forums.

I had the exact same issue and i solved with this code in category.php K2 template override. As Krikor said pagination is Joomla's functionality so i think you have to do something like this:

$doc = JFactory::getDocument();
$pagdata = $this->pagination->getData();

if ($pagdata->next->link) {
$doc->addHeadLink( $pagdata->next->link, 'next');
}

if ($pagdata->previous->link) {
$doc->addHeadLink( $pagdata->previous->link, 'prev');
}

This will not change the url but now google can see which page is next or prev.

Thank you for sharing this Ioannis :)

I am no developer, but I would think the code would look more like this...


$doc = JFactory::getDocument();
$pagdata = $this->pagination->getData();

if ($pagdata->next->link) {
$doc->addCustomTag('<link rel="next" href="'.$pagdata->next->link.'" />');
}

if ($pagdata->previous->link) {
$doc->addCustomTag('<link rel="prev" href="'.$pagdata->previous->link.'" />');
}


More on the subjectL

Google treats rel="previous" as a syntactic variant of rel="prev". Values can be either relative or absolute URLs (as allowed by the <link> tag). And, if you include a <base> link in your document, relative paths will resolve according to the base URL.

source: support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1663744?hl=en

I never noticed this before, but my paginated pages display "limit" and "start" in the URL:
?limit=12&start=24

While other K2 sites, such as the JoomlaWorks blog paginated pages display:
?start=6

Why is this? Is this a K2 thing? How can I get a simple /page-2 instead?

The url pattern unfortunately is controlled by Joomla!.
To change the generated URLs you will need an SEO extension.

Thanks @Krikor any idea why my pattern is different for the JoomlaWorks blog pattern? Both sites are K2