Link-A-Tron is a set of two Joomla! plug-ins, designed to help you with advanced link behaviour management in the Joomla! CMS. They can be used independently or in parallel for maximum control.

The “Link-A-Tron System Plug-in” takes care of:

• Base tag fixing. It resets the document's link base to the site's root instead of the current page. This will fix certain menu components which are missing icons whenever you enable SEF URLs at the expense of losing XHTML compliance.
• Canonical hinting. Includes a canonical URL “hint” instruction inside the page’s for Google and other search engines to use. It uses Joomla!’s router infrastructure to calculate the canonical URL, so it should work with third-party SEO components such as sh404SEF, AceSEF, etc.
• Canonical link redirection. If the current page’s URL differs from the canonical URL, it will promptly redirect the web client (be it a browser or a search engine spider) to the canonical URL, mitigating URL proliferation.

Each of these options can be separately toggled on and off in the plug-in configuration. Do note that all of these features are redundant if you are using AceSEF. This component is able to automatically handle all of the above.

The “Link-A-Tron Content Plug-In”, on the other hand, takes care of the remaining issues:

• Link migration. You supply a list of addresses where your site used to be installed and the plug-in will replace all links to URLs referencing those sites with ones which point to the current site. Let's say that you had a site on www.example.com and you moved it to www.example.net. You just supply the old domain name (www.example.com) and all links (<a> tags) and images (<img> tags) will be rewritten to replace the old domain with the new domain. This is useful when migrating your site to a new domain using Akeeba Backup!
• Non SEF URL rewriting. It replaces links – found inside your content items – to non SEO URLs so that they point to their SEO equivalent. For example, it will transform the ugly http://www.example.com/index.php?option=com_plants&catid=1:fruits&id=1:banana URL to the SEO-friendly http://www.example.com/fruits/banana.html URL.

Do note that most SEF components will take care of non SEF URL rewriting, however none of them handles link migration. Maybe this is the most useful feature of Link-a-tron.

This plug-in works independently from the system plug-in and its options can be separately toggled on and off in the plug-in configuration. Since it is a content plug-in, it will be used in Joomla! articles, as well as any other content extension which makes use of content plug-ins, such as K2 by JoomlaWorks, or Visitor 2 Buyer by yours truly.

You can download the system and content plug-ins from the Downloads section of this site.