JFBConnect Overwrites Canonical URLs

Toby,
First, well done for understanding canonical links, og:url tags, and all the other stuff that goes into SEO. Seriously, you're one of the few that gets it.

With that said, JFBConnect is designed for admins that don't have all that knowledge and meant to work with SEO extensions that flat out get it all wrong. Our og:url handler does a lot of effort to find the 'best' URL for a page. So, if you're in a Joomla article, we don't just use the current URL, we'll use a canonical URL for all the various URLs that Joomla could create. In all honesty, our og:url tag may not be the URL you expect (though we try).. but, it will always be the same whenever an article is visited, which is the most important thing to make sure that your Like count isn't spread out amongst many different pages.

The above works for 99.999% of users because they don't understand (or even want to know what) a canonical URL is. It's our job to make things simpler in that regard.

Unfortunately, many extensions (and Joomla itself) insert the rel="canonical" tag without any regard for actually determining a canonical URL. Most of the time, they just use the current URL. JFBConnect does a bit of work within Joomla (to pick a menu item, category, etc) and even outside Joomla (stripping Google analytics tracking tags, etc) to get a URL that doesn't cause too many problems.

Whew... with all that said, we don't have an option to disable our og:url behavior. However, you can disable our og:url behavior in general by editing the /libraries/sourcecoast/OpenGraph.php file. Around line 240, you'll see:Comment both those lines out by adding // in front of them.

If you're using our Open Graph plugins for Joomla content or other extensions, a very good og:url tag will still be added. For the rest of your pages/extensions, we'll leave them alone, which may be what you're after.

I hope that helps explain and get you going, but if you have any feedback or suggestions on how to improve things, we're always listening.

Thanks,
Alex

The code that Alex mentioned to comment out is for when JFBConnect attempts to set the og:url tag if there is nothing else in our code that is setting that tag. For instance, if you include an SCOpenGraph easy-tag on the page to set the url, it will still work in this case. Also, some of our Open Graph plugins (such as for EasySocial and JomSocial) will attempt to set the og:url tag specific to those extensions.

Using the Skip Tags setting will block JFBConnect from adding the og:url tag to the page in any of the above cases (our plugins, easy-tags, defaults and attempting to auto-generate values if no og:url is present). If using this setting is working for you, then I'd suggest using that, as you won't lose any changes if you upgrade.

-Melissa