Can not get Route 66 to produce SEF URLs and remove duplicates

Hi there,

I have an up-to-date Joomla site (5.2.3 as of today). I have activated Joomla SEF. I followed various SEO tutorial such as Joomla SEO - The Ultimate guide for SEO in Joomla - Firecoders and many others. My .htaccess is in place, necessary system plugins are active and configured. Most of my links associated with a menu item are OK with a nice SEF URL. Same for the articles coming from the category associated with a menu item (this category menu links to a page that lists all articles in the category).

But I still have a problem with internal links to “isolated” articles called from another article and links to “featured” articles. They are ugly and they create duplicates. So I have installed Route 66 PRO 1.10.0 with a one year subscription. My “Download ID” is in place, I have activated all plugins and configured all items related to SEF (canonical links, redirects, sitemaps, SEO analysis). My URL patterns are {categoryAlias}/{articleAlias} for articles and {categoryAlias} for categories

Route 66 does not seem to change anything: links that were OK are unchanged and still OK; links that were not OK are either unchanged or changed in a way that is not friendly at all.

I have tried to activate/deactivate Route 66 and or Joomla SEF engine. I have checked the results by crawling my site with https://www.xml-sitemaps.com. Here is what I see with examples of links to “isolated” articles called from another article and links to “featured” articles:

• With Joomla SEF activated and R66 deactivated :
https://mysite.com/fr/component/content/article/photos-concert-parc-champagne?catid=15
https://mysite.com/en/component/content/?task=view&id=26&Itemid=28

• With both Joomla SEF and R66 activated :
https://mysite.com/fr/?view=article&catid=15&id=63
https://mysite.com/en/component/content/featured?task=view&id=26&Itemid=28

When I deactivate Joomla SEF and activate R66 all links are “not OK”, e.g.:
https://mysite.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=14&Itemid=111&lang=fr

I'm now out of options so I hope you guys can help me figure out the problem

Thanks for your swift reply. Here are some answers/comments:

"System SEF" plugin enabled & SEF URLs activated in Joomla's Global Configuration => Yes it's the case (cf. SEO settings in the Global Configuration / Site)

For debugging, you can quickly enable or disable Route 66 by toggling the "System - Route 66" plugin. For now, I recommend disabling it until we identify the root cause. => OK, thanks. I keep it activated on my online site. I can disable any time on my test site where we can do the debugging

Multilingual Status => status ok for en-GB and fr-FR (screen copy here)

how the problematic links are generated? they are internal links from one article to another article, created within an article using Joomla link editor in the WYSIWYG interface (JCE Editor). I have tried to regenerate one of those links after enabling Route 66, it changed the structure slightly but was definitely still not SEF. I noticed that the articles associated to a menu item are SEF (e.g. https://soprano.lyrique.org/en/information-about-mi-kyung/repertoire called using the menu "Information about Mi-kyung / repertoire" as well as those called from a category that is linked to a menu item. If you check from the article repertoire all five articles linked have non SEF URLs

Featured Articles : OK, understood. Thanks. I have only 2 links of this type but i'll create a menu item for them

link to your website: online version is https://soprano.lyrique.org/

System - SEF configuration : screen copy here. FYI I have the same symptoms when I leave Domain name empty and strict routing to "no"

thanks again, best regards