Hello,

it seems Hotposts Pro is making it impossible to use Joomla's own meta-tag engine.

Apparently the only part that isn't overridden by Hotspots is where Joomla defines a universal meta description or a meta keywords tag for a specific content language. Any article, category or menu item I customize the meta data for doesn't output that in the source code. This is a big issue to my project for SEO.

This means if I, say, define a description and write a few keywords for the English language of my website then the whole English website will have the same meta tags, and that is bad for SEO but at least this shows the engine works somewhere as it should and normally does. Joomla is doing its job somewhere on my website basically. I clearly don't want that SEO approach with Google's duplicate content policy so I remove all data from those language meta-fields. However I have proof that Joomla works and it's not a general CMS bug.

When I go any more specific than that the source code doesn't contain any meta data so my pages are harder to parse for crawlers.

I have already discussed this with the template framework developers, i.e. Gantry 5. Gantry has its own meta-tag engine and I tried that too but it's not as versatile as Joomla's very own so I can't really use it. However I needed to test its behavior to narrow down the potential culprits.

Gantry 5 can output everything I include in its meta-data collection BUT the very meta description and the meta keywords that get overriden by something else and end up missing entirely. I wanted to make sure the template itself wasn't causing these troubles, not being maybe completely compatible and it seems to be behaving in an unexplainable way on my website according to its developers. So they asked if I was using any other components that dealt with meta data in some way. Therefore we fear Hotspots Pro may be to blame as it's the only other component dealing with meta tags that our website uses.

I know the hotspots categories are Joomla's own and that this component includes the OpenGraph protocol for its data so I believe that means it may have an effect on how Joomla manages the meta-data or it is likely to have something to do with this issue.

What do you think or recommend?