basic question on sh404sef for joomla

[cmendla]

I'm hoping someone can give me a quick pointer here.

I had a lot of duplicate content issues with my joomla sites. I installed sh404sef to try to fix this.

1. Do I need to enter a canonical URL for every SEF url that shows or do I just need to do that for the URLs that are showing duplicates
2. When I enter a canonical URL do I have to use the full URL ie www.example.com/widgets/about.html or can I just use /widgets/about.html ?
3. If I do things right, how long does it take for google to stop showing urls as having dupe descriptions or titles assuming I am getting crawled daily?

Unfortunately the documentation doesn't seem to cover the basics or I missed it somewhere.

I'd really appreciate any guidance here as I'm anxious to try to get the dupe issue resolved.

thanks

chris

[ergophobe]

*bump* Any Joomla users here to help Chris?

[lucy24]

2. When I enter a canonical URL do I have to use the full URL ie www.example.com/widgets/about.html or can I just use /widgets/about.html ?

A site-absolute URL is enough. That's assuming you already have code that redirects any requests for the wrong form of your site name (with/without www). So by the time a user-agent sees the link, they've already got the hostname in the correct form.

That was the easy one ;)

[phranque]

3. If I do things right, how long does it take for google to stop showing urls as having dupe descriptions or titles assuming I am getting crawled daily?

you should post this question in the appropriate forum.
Google SEO News and Discussion:
http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/ [webmasterworld.com]