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How SEO friendly is joomla ?

Posted: Sun Mar 05, 2006 4:18 pm
by gdev
Hey everybody,

There seems to be alot of contreversial opinions about how SEO friendly a joomla site would be ... By this I mean: how well a joomla site can be optimized for search engines ...

Can anyone tell me where the limits are ? And maybe how joomla compares to the SEO friendlyness of other open source (or even commercial) cmsses ? 

Gdev ..

Re: How SEO friendly is joomla ?

Posted: Sun Mar 05, 2006 5:09 pm
by pe7er
gdev wrote:how well a joomla site can be optimized for search engines...
Every search engine uses other indexing techniques.
The technique of indexing is a well kept secret.
and the indexing technique changes a lot.
So, there's no one-fits-all solution!

Joomla does a lot of SEO (like the usage of the title of the page into the browser title bar). But a lot of SEO has to be done by writing the articles on your site. You can use a lot of SEO techniques of a CMS, but when text of the articles is not well thought of (regarding SEO) there's not much to gain.

Re: How SEO friendly is joomla ?

Posted: Sun Mar 05, 2006 7:22 pm
by mindnsoul
You guys need to stop beting around the bush with politicaly correct and over analytical answers and tell this poor guy the truth. Joomla or Mambo is horrible for Google optimization (and others). If you've got a site that's even half decently well ranking and you decide to cut over to joomla you will cry for many many many months.

I've ported 7 clients over to this platform and have even kept their old URL structures but joomla's duplicate content ID problems and constant database breaking of SEF URLS will send you right were you don't need to be in SERPS.. the bottom..

You should look into another CMS if SEF is a big consern of yours and revisit joomla down the line, as most of these problems are being worked on to be fixed.

Re: How SEO friendly is joomla ?

Posted: Sun Mar 05, 2006 8:31 pm
by pe7er
wow, you have a negative attitude...  :(
mindnsoul wrote:You guys need to stop beting around the bush with politicaly correct and over analytical answers and tell this poor guy the truth.
The question was "how well a joomla site can be optimized for search engines". I tried to explain that there are a lot of different Search Engines that all have their own indexing techniques, so there's no best SEO method for all.

In your message you only go into Google as search engine with your statement that "Joomla or Mambo is horrible for Google optimization". Of course Google is currently (one of) the major Search Engine, but what about the other search engines?
Joomla or Mambo is horrible for Google optimization (and others). If you've got a site that's even half decently well ranking and you decide to cut over to joomla you will cry for many many many months. [...] You should look into another CMS if SEF is a big consern of yours and revisit joomla down the line, as most of these problems are being worked on to be fixed.
Here I fully disagree with you. SEF and components like OpenSEF can improve SEO a lot....
But again, there's NO best SEO solution as every search engine uses it's own indexing techniques. And a lot depends on the text you use in your articles forms a great part of the SEO.

Re: How SEO friendly is joomla ?

Posted: Sun Mar 05, 2006 10:54 pm
by johnny123
then I hope someone can answer my question about the main page joomla links because as it stands I can not take the site live with 3 different instances of the front page. That is a major search engine problem across all search engines.

Re: How SEO friendly is joomla ?

Posted: Sun Mar 05, 2006 11:11 pm
by mattr2110
mindnsoul wrote: You guys need to stop beting around the bush with politicaly correct and over analytical answers and tell this poor guy the truth. Joomla or Mambo is horrible for Google optimization (and others). If you've got a site that's even half decently well ranking and you decide to cut over to joomla you will cry for many many many months.

I've ported 7 clients over to this platform and have even kept their old URL structures but joomla's duplicate content ID problems and constant database breaking of SEF URLS will send you right were you don't need to be in SERPS.. the bottom..

You should look into another CMS if SEF is a big consern of yours and revisit joomla down the line, as most of these problems are being worked on to be fixed.
What CMS would you recommend if SEF is a big consern?

Re: How SEO friendly is joomla ?

Posted: Mon Mar 06, 2006 1:08 am
by mindnsoul
There are not as feature rich or easy to use but I know some very well ranking site that use:

drupal, typo3 or if you want to go really easy and simple to use and is great for SEF try Movable Type.

Re: How SEO friendly is joomla ?

Posted: Mon Mar 06, 2006 12:35 pm
by gdev
Maybe I should have been more precise in my question pe7er ; I am well aware of different SEO techniques across different searchengines. Google though, is the major free searchengine in wich sites would usually like to position themselves well. Content is always king and writing a good copy is only part of good SEO practise, since Google predominantly asigns pagerank as a result of link-popularity.

Aside from that, page-structure plays a major role too and I've heard that spiders are having trouble digging into a joomla / mambo site. I would like to know why and if there's something that can be done about that.

My question should have probably been : in what way(s) is a joomla optimized site (with correct use of all resources such as components a.s.o.) limited compared to a 'staticly / standalone / or whatever you want to call it) site in regard of maximum SEO across most the popular engines ?

Since SEO is a MAJOR concern for me I'd like to know the weaknesses and how (and if it's worth it) to overcome them.

Grts,
Gdev

Re: How SEO friendly is joomla ?

Posted: Tue Mar 07, 2006 2:46 am
by mindnsoul
none..

Re: How SEO friendly is joomla ?

Posted: Tue Mar 07, 2006 2:38 pm
by gdev
Allright, mindsoul's opinion speaks books.... now I'd like to hear from someone who's thinks otherwise (if they are there ... ) pe7er ?

Gdev.

Re: How SEO friendly is joomla ?

Posted: Tue Mar 07, 2006 3:15 pm
by pe7er
Joomla & SEO (for Google):
  • Joomla places the title of an article automatically in the tag.
  • It does not automatically use , but you can define that yourself in .css and use it for your keywords.
  • Hyperlinks: place keywords in tag for the links at your site.
  • Folders & images names: use keywords in the names, just like non-CMS systems.
  • SEF components can give you nice URLs with keywords included.
  • Joomla can generate Meta tags. However nowadays irrelevant for indexing.
The disavantage of Joomla and of all CMS regarding SEO:
In general, keywords near the tag are considered more important then others.
The text (with your keywords) of an article only starts halfway the html page, and not near the tag.
That's because the modules (like menu's) are loaded before the article is.

Anyone else some other thoughts?

Re: How SEO friendly is joomla ?

Posted: Tue Mar 07, 2006 3:55 pm
by gram
With a template that loads the content first, as apposed to menus first, ranking can be slightly increased.  This will place your primary content and its accompanying title, images (with good alt tags) etc...  just after whatever your header has in it.  The key would be to not use a header that contains a lot of text in it.

pe7er has some very good suggestions. 

I use Joomla/Mambo for some very well ranked sights, and have no problems.  I would suggest turning SEF urls on immediately, and not reverting back if you plan to use them.  This will minimize the problems associated with duplicate content if you do this before a search engine ever indexes your site.

The front page problems are diminishing, and may be resolved by now. Alternatively, you could use a regular content item as your front page, and make sure it is not accessible via any of your other menu items.  It simply needs to be the first menu item on the main menu.  I would suggest making a section and category just for it, not adding that section or category to any other menu item, then making that menu item the very first selection on your main menu.  If you want to make it even better (only one way to get there, "http://yourdomain.com/") move the main menu to a unused template position and recreate the main menu under a different menu name for site usage.  That way the only link available to that front page item will be the domain name, or domain name +index.php.

The key here is going to be getting a template that is SEO friendly.  Menus on the right side of the content or CSS used to place content first in spite of placement.  If you check my link in my sig to the SAM code team website, you will see that our content comes first (in the html), menus come after that.  The header has a very small amount of text (that relates to our site purpose) and a primary site menu (four or five links).  This gets our content much closer to the tag and helps tremendously.

I wish content titles would be encapsulated in H1 tags, but that could potentially break sites that do not use this methodology.  It would be nice to have that as an option in our admin utlilities.  I use pe7er's method of using them myself within relevant content items when appropriate.

To search engines, title, first 300 or so words after body tag, and keyword density are king.  Keyword density should be within normal test that adheres to proper grammer rules.  Trying to overdue it (use keywords too much) or using them out of context to proper grammer to try and capture search phrases will get a page blocked, so don't do it (don't ask how I know that...).

To get a reasonable page rank (best results in SERPS) you need good one way links back to your site.  Reciprocal links tend to get discounted or not counted.  The links need to have names that use your targetted keywords or phrases.  The search engines will use them to rank your site for searches that contain the same keywords or phrases.

Internal links within your site are measured as well.  Based on the same criteria.  The more pages your site has, that are within one or two clicks of your home page, the better.  Their links will count as 'votes' for your site and help to increase its rank.  Get a good site map utility and its link to a menu that is shown on every page.  That way every page on your site is within a couple of clicks of every other page.  So if a page gets ranked well, its votes will help increase the votes for other pages.

This process takes a long time.  The search engines move very slowely with respect to changes on a website, and can take a very long time to initially index the site.

I would disagree with only one thing posted by per7er, and that is the use of meta tags.  We all know that the meta keywords tag has become nearly obsolete, but the meta description is still relevant and used a lot.  Make good use of it, and avoid putting a long windy one in for the whole site.  Use the meta descriptions in the articles for better searchability.  Keep this combined (whole site plus individual page meta descriptions) down to about 250 words.  If you get a search hit from a title alone, this will tend to be what the search requestor will see for the page text on many search engines.

DON'T ignore the opportunity to use image alt tags to your benefit.  They are a great place to include search phrases to help increase keyword density.  Use them.

My sincerest apologies for the long post.  This is a REAL deep subject, and there are many good websites devoted exclusively to addressing it.

GRAM

 

Re: How SEO friendly is joomla ?

Posted: Tue Jul 18, 2006 6:48 pm
by mdb76
Sorry for rehashing this thread, but its right on topic for me.

I am a true end user/administrator as far as websites go. I can get Joomla sites up and running with no problems and can even get creative and have even resorted to manually editing things in the database when needed. However, I know one thing about code - and that's that I know nothing! This is why I don't want to use SEF URL's. I have problems troubleshooting issues if/when they arise to broken links. I find it safer to stick with standard urls.

My new Joomla site has just debuted last week in Google at number 3 for a search on our two main keywords which is great. Ironically, our page rank is 0. Yahoo, NineMSN and Altavista (Australia) rank us at #1. I will note that NineMSN didn't rank us so high until Google did. I have noticed this before.

I have some questions:

  • It seems Google has not spidered our entire site, just the front page. Is this normal for a first crawl? Is there a way of checking this for sure?
  • How does Google treat the links in an article. If I have a content item that is 5 pages long, does Google rank the 5th page lower than the 1st page because it is 'deeper' in the site?
  • If I write good copy will this outweigh the SEF URL's issue?
  • Should I rename my templates slices to include keywords?
Despite the reading and all the suggested techniques, I still come up trumps on so many issues, it seems SEO is quite subjective. This isn't really a surprise as  most search engine algorithms are a trade secret. I am rapidly coming to the conclusion that, as time is money, paying for sponsored links in Google for major keywords would be a far more sensible option.

Kind regards,
Mame du Bois

Re: How SEO friendly is joomla ?

Posted: Tue Jul 18, 2006 10:11 pm
by eike
mdb76 wrote:
  • If I write good copy will this outweigh the SEF URL's issue?
In my experience good copy will beat anything else and people should spend much more time on copy writing then on toying around with HTML tags and SEF Urls (this stuff will be eventually helpful but first there must be something that is searchable in the first place). 95% of the Internet is crap HTML (including most top ranking sites) and the search engines still find the stuff, so clearly code quality and nice urls are not the main issue.

Of course I'm just this guy so I would have trouble to explain to you why you should believe me, but I'm doing web stuff for quite some time now and so I think I know what I'm talking about for most of the time.

-- eike

Re: How SEO friendly is joomla ?

Posted: Tue Jul 18, 2006 10:23 pm
by mdb76
Hi, I basically agree.

However, after some more digging, I discovered that Google has not indexed all of the pages on my site. In particular, all urls that result from the [mospagebreak] have not been indexed, only the first page of the article. Having the best copy in the world is no good if the search engines don't crawl the page.

A sitemap which includes these dynamically created pages would be ideal. I have already submitted a feature request at the Joomap forge. Other than that, I guess manually creating a map to each page might help.

Kind regards,
Mame du Bois

Re: How SEO friendly is joomla ?

Posted: Tue Jul 18, 2006 10:28 pm
by ivytony
I believe google indexing depends on the quality of your site contents. Website age may be another factor for good crawling and indexing.

Having been running my site for two years, it now gets lots of crawling and indexing of many SE's, which brings me a lot of traffic.

Re: How SEO friendly is joomla ?

Posted: Tue Jul 18, 2006 10:58 pm
by gram
ITs important to evaluate click depth for your site, and each page you want the search engines to index.  Count the number of clicks required to access the page you are targeting and you can just about subtract one point per click.

The mospagebreak tags do little to help.  They place subsequent content that many more clicks from a primary page.  They also have no keywords in them so don't help to get the page indexed under whatever your targetted keywords are.  LINKS are KING, and absolutely the best way to associate search engine rankings with your targeted key words.  That includes internal links that point back to your own website and its content.

That said, SEF url's help much much less than the text content of a link.  And to agree with eike, content is tops all the way around.  The more high quality (reads well, not well formed html) content you have, the more potential for search engine indexing.

GRAM 

Re: How SEO friendly is joomla ?

Posted: Tue Jul 18, 2006 11:10 pm
by duvien
eike wrote:

In my experience good copy will beat anything else and people should spend much more time on copy writing then on toying around with HTML tags and SEF Urls (this stuff will be eventually helpful but first there must be something that is searchable in the first place). 95% of the Internet is crap HTML (including most top ranking sites) and the search engines still find the stuff, so clearly code quality and nice urls are not the main issue.
I agree... like they all say, "content is king". As for the latter, i think Google gives more weighting to websites that have been around for years so it's not necessary that code quality does not matter.

Re: How SEO friendly is joomla ?

Posted: Tue Jul 18, 2006 11:26 pm
by mdb76
The mospagebreak tags do little to help.  They place subsequent content that many more clicks from a primary page.  They also have no keywords in them so don't help to get the page indexed under whatever your targetted keywords are.
You can actually manipulate the tags to display titles using {mospagebreak title= Page Title}

I will also note that if you have the article index activated, each page of the article is directly reachable from the first page so that defeats the link depth theory. Perhaps because my site is new. Having said that, we debuted at #3 for our two main keywords.

Mame du Bois

Re: How SEO friendly is joomla ?

Posted: Wed Jul 19, 2006 6:44 am
by FidelGonzales
mindnsoul wrote: You guys need to stop beting around the bush with politicaly correct and over analytical answers and tell this poor guy the truth. Joomla or Mambo is horrible for Google optimization (and others). If you've got a site that's even half decently well ranking and you decide to cut over to joomla you will cry for many many many months.

I've ported 7 clients over to this platform and have even kept their old URL structures but joomla's duplicate content ID problems and constant database breaking of SEF URLS will send you right were you don't need to be in SERPS.. the bottom..

You should look into another CMS if SEF is a big consern of yours and revisit joomla down the line, as most of these problems are being worked on to be fixed.
Wow. Disgruntle?

Well, I hereby vehemently disagree with your views. And this despite the pros and cons of several new sites I am working on, which after only being up for several weeks enjoy Google search engine referrals. One of these sites was simply forgotten by Google several weeks back, but in return has gained equally greater results by MSN and Yahoo. I'd prefer Google traffic, but 100 visitors a day from Google is just as good as 100 visitors a day from MSN.

And if one was to take your advice and go with another CMS, their options would be considerably limited by many accounts. Furthermore, to suggest that a person ought to later revisit Joomla is only suggesting that it would be worth redeveloping the entire site, which is contrary to your own SEF URL logic, as the URLs would all change.

Stick with Joomla and Open-SEF as your platform and work your way deeper into application bliss from there. Before loading additional components, consider their popularity as an indicator of its long-term viability.

P.S. I'm not really vehement in this reply, but consider toning it down a bit, dude. Some constructive critisism goes a long way, particularly when you back that up with optional solutions, which I await you to post.

Re: How SEO friendly is joomla ?

Posted: Wed Jul 19, 2006 7:09 am
by FidelGonzales
mdb76 wrote: However, I know one thing about code - and that's that I know nothing! This is why I don't want to use SEF URL's. I have problems troubleshooting issues if/when they arise to broken links. I find it safer to stick with standard urls.
Open-SEF works like a charm. Nevertheless, one of the most popular sites I have built using Joomla does not make use of SEF URLs. Properly writtent content, placed content and content links works wonders. SEF URLs is not absolutely required but does make an impact when the same content is compared from a non-SEF URL site to an SEF URL site.
mdb76 wrote: My new Joomla site has just debuted last week in Google at number 3 for a search on our two main keywords which is great. Ironically, our page rank is 0. Yahoo, NineMSN and Altavista (Australia) rank us at #1. I will note that NineMSN didn't rank us so high until Google did. I have noticed this before.
Several of my sites have low page rankings but have good search engine rankings. One latest site, wasn't online but two days before it was cached on Google.
mdb76 wrote: It seems Google has not spidered our entire site, just the front page. Is this normal for a first crawl? Is there a way of checking this for sure?
As mentioned in this excellent thread, it takes a while for the search engines, Google included, to make its way beyond the front page and through the various levels of linked pages.
mdb76 wrote: If I write good copy will this outweigh the SEF URL's issue?[/list]
Absolutely.
mdb76 wrote: Despite the reading and all the suggested techniques, I still come up trumps on so many issues, it seems SEO is quite subjective. This isn't really a surprise as  most search engine algorithms are a trade secret. I am rapidly coming to the conclusion that, as time is money, paying for sponsored links in Google for major keywords would be a far more sensible option.
Google ads serve their purpose as an excellent and excellent temporary backup means of acquirring traffic. One page of well-written (useful to the visitor to keep them interested and coming back and useful to the search engine) and well-linked (linked upon strategic positions using targeted keywords within the link and alt-tag) is more expensive but carries a greater and longer lasting benefit to your visitors and the search engines than does any ad, and as for ads, I personally prefer contextual ads over that of graphical ads, and this again contributes to the search engine rankings.

Re: How SEO friendly is joomla ?

Posted: Wed Jul 19, 2006 9:03 am
by mdb76
Hi,

Just to clarify, I was specifically referring to sponsored links in Google and not Google Ads. 

I am quite prejudiced to sites that use Google Ads. Part of this is because I have come across so many sites that stick them in the most obtrusive position. I also find they can obscure content. It's no point having a great article if people leave the page because of a great big chunk of Google Ads. I will admit however, that as webmasters become more 'in tune' with their site visitors, some are using them more effectively. I personally would rather make use of other programs to monetise a website.

Kind regards,
Mame du Bois

Re: How SEO friendly is joomla ?

Posted: Wed Jul 19, 2006 9:14 am
by giles
mindnsoul wrote: You guys need to stop beting around the bush with politicaly correct and over analytical answers and tell this poor guy the truth. Joomla or Mambo is horrible for Google optimization (and others). If you've got a site that's even half decently well ranking and you decide to cut over to joomla you will cry for many many many months.

I've ported 7 clients over to this platform and have even kept their old URL structures but joomla's duplicate content ID problems and constant database breaking of SEF URLS will send you right were you don't need to be in SERPS.. the bottom..

You should look into another CMS if SEF is a big consern of yours and revisit joomla down the line, as most of these problems are being worked on to be fixed.
Sorry, but I have to disagree with you wholeheartedly. I also have ported ovver several clients, ALL are still front page on Google. Let me reiterate that...I have lost no places by moving to joomla.

I have also set up a new new driven site this was cached within 10 days, so no sandbox, it does well in searches on all engines.

I do use meta tags and meta description. i do use a sitemap and register it with google. i do put up relevant content. I use the standard search friendly url setting that comes with the core install.

Giles

Re: How SEO friendly is joomla ?

Posted: Wed Jul 19, 2006 11:47 am
by MarkV
Some folks already mentioned it. Content, content content...

Content, keywords and links
Pageranking is way less importent than search engine ranking on keyword. Yes your search enige ranking is higher with a good pagerank and sometimes that is really importent on some keywords. The only way to get a high PR is loads of quality links to your website.

The first page a user or SE usually sees is your frontpage. Use a good text with keywords that define your website. Very importent because links from other websites are usualy to your frontpage too. That page gets the high pagerank so that page should have the keywords.

So content, keywords and links. Thats what it's all about.

Other (unmentioned) factors than come in play
  • Age of the content
  • Total site size
  • Uptime of the website
  • Time to load
  • Number of outgoing links (and PR of the websites you link to)
  • Number of userclick on keyword in SE results (compared to others listed obove and below you
Page and layout?
Page/code layout? Hardley a factor. Do you really think that google can 'look' at your site. They can index code. Thats a different thing. And nice and valid code is more easy to read. Where you place your content (in the code or on you screen) doesn't really matter at all.

Other factors
Alt tags, title tags, H1 Bold an Underlined text, page titles, meta's, urls etc. Those are factors too.

Back to the content
You want to write something that your visitors will find attractive. Visiters can find stuff by searching with keywords. Make sure those keywords can be found in your text.
Is you are listed in de searchresults of a user, make sure your site stands out. Good title tag, with a good description of the content.

Last thoughts
How many visitors do you want. You can have a 1000 visiters a day but if they leave your site after seeing the frontpage, than a 1000 visitors bring you noting... I rather have 50 visitors that read 5 or maybe 20 pages, and read it for 1 minute a page. Users find you on keywords they stay on content....

Re: How SEO friendly is joomla ?

Posted: Wed Jul 19, 2006 12:43 pm
by mdb76
Hi,

I have heard a lot of talk about the Hx tags, especially the H1 tags. Is there any official (or unofficial) comment on Joomla and the H1 tag? From what I have read, Joomla uses a different tag which some seo fans believe is problematic. Any thoughts?
Other factors
Alt tags, title tags, H1 Bold an Underlined text, page titles, meta's, urls etc. Those are factors too.
Could you elaborate more on this please? Also, what would your opinion be on image filename titles.

Kind regards,
Mame du Bois

Re: How SEO friendly is joomla ?

Posted: Sun Jan 14, 2007 3:10 pm
by dgenie
Hi, I find this topic very useful, so I decided to continue here instead of opening a new thread.
I've an issue about my front page and PageRank.
The PageRank of the frontpage is 0 although any other page in the main menu has a PageRank of 3 or 4.

From the post of Gram i can argue it's a widespreaded problem for Joomla sites:
The front page problems are diminishing, and may be resolved by now. Alternatively, you could use a regular content item as your front page, and make sure it is not accessible via any of your other menu items.  It simply needs to be the first menu item on the main menu.
How can I solve it? Putting the frontpage as a regular content item is the only solution?
Thanks

Re: How SEO friendly is joomla ?

Posted: Sun Jan 14, 2007 6:42 pm
by gram
This is a really old thread dgenie, I suspect you would have been better served creating a new one.

There is a solution to the front page problem, but for clarity sake lets restate it (for benefit of others reading this post).

Joomla'a front page can be accessed two ways.  It can be accessed via your domain name (and directory if applicable) alone ie: http://yourdomainname.com/, and it can also be accessed via its menu selection which would be some thing like: http://yourdomainname.com/component/opt ... /Itemid,1/ .

From Google's point of view these are two different pages, which violates Google's duplicated content advisories. 

For new sites, all menu items can be removed from the main menu (except front page) and the menu can be re-assigned to a non-used template position (thus it as active, but never display's).  The main menu will need to be replaced with something else which would display the main menu items. 

Unfortunately, with an older site the url to the front page is already being indexed by the search engines and this won't work.  Also, doing this changes the 'itemid' for the items that are deleted from the main menu and added to another, thus creating new urls for each (thus brand new unranked pages for Google).  If you really know what you are doing, it is possible to create the new menu and then edit the menu table directly to change each main menu item's menu assignment to the new one and preserve the original itemid.

If you choose to do this to an existing site, it would also be real important to add some code somewhere (fastest in main Joomla index.php - but will have to be re-added with each upgrade) perhaps in a your template's index.php looking for the long form url to the front page component.  If this url is requested, the browser can be permanently redirected to the domain name alone (http://yourdomainname.com).  Google will then dutifully assign (in time) the page rank aquired under the long form to the domain name alone. 

I would suggest you also be sure that every single page on your site have a link back your domain name alone.  I do this by linking the site name at the top of every site back to the domain name alone.  I also create a new 'home' link somewhere on each page (in a menu or in the template) that links back to the domain name.

And final word, its not unusual to see pages within a site rank higher than the home page.  (1) thats one reason why you want every page to link back to your home page, (2)apparently that page has more high quality links coming back to you from somewhere else and from Google's point of view it earned a higher rank.

Sorry for long response, but its a deep topic.

Good luck !

GRAM

Re: How SEO friendly is joomla ?

Posted: Sun Jan 14, 2007 7:08 pm
by alan-s
On the H1,H2 tag issue....
I launched a site last week - revamp of a mambo install and used accessible Joomla a8ejoomla content.html.php to get the most tableless design I could using H1 in the main logo, and using h2 - courtesy of a8ejoomla - for titles. I borrowed for a8ejoomla for accessibility purposes (brief was WAI Priority 2 where possible -pretty pleased actually ;)).

After reading this thread I did a quick google and was surprised to find the new site already indexed and rating number 2 on its main acronym search ('ARI' - stands for Allotments Regeneration Initiative). This is without using SEF native to Joomla! I think probably the keyword density and logical heading tags structure helps but the menus come before the content, breaking another useful recommendation in this thread. It seems a dark art with shifting goal posts but I am convinced that accessible designs and a bit of help from a8ejoomla has helped this site(no hard evidence but intuition and experience). Question is will it get worse with SEF?! :)

Re: How SEO friendly is joomla ?

Posted: Mon Jan 15, 2007 2:58 pm
by dgenie
Thanks for the fast reply.
My situation is a bit different.
I use Artio joomSEF to convert my site URLs.
So I had these links, all pointing to my frontpage: Yesterday I changed some of these URLs, trying to solve my problem. This is actual situation: So now only two link in Google could poit to my frontpage, http://mysite.ext/ and http//mysite.ext/index.php. May I still have the problem of duplication? I wasn't able to semplify more http://mysite.ext/index.php with joomSEF, may I use htaccess to translate http://mysite.ext/index.php into http://mysite.ext/?
Forgive me for my English but it's not my first language.