Joomla! Discussion Forums

Some good news today for those of you worried about the search engine rankings of your Joomla sites. According to an inteview with Vanessa Fox from Google, there will be no penalty for having duplicate content (that is: having many URLs pointing to the same page).

Joomla and other CMS systems often produce several duplicate URLs. According to Fox, you can use a Google SiteMap to tell the search engine which URL you do want listed. Otherwise the Google bots will do it for you and pick just one of your multiple URLs. Either way, there won't be a penalty.

The interview is in the video section over at WebProNews

Good news indeed. Do you happen to have a direct link? I'm having troubles finding it (been a long day).

Thanks

No need to worry then. 
Here´s a direct link: http://videos.webpronews.com/2006/12/06 ... -sitemaps/

Interestingly, she also mentions that:

• Google doesn't really mind about the code to text ratio.
• Google site maps don't help your ranking - they might just help you launch your site faster

Thank you for the link.

This is a clarification on an official Google blog:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot. ... ntent.html

On the one hand....



On the other, he warns that people need to:

I'm pretty dumb about all this stuff, but as it affects me I'd like to ask a couple of questions, ignorant as they may be.

1) Should I understand that it is the joomla developers' plan that the joomla CMS will now create multiple url's for content depending on how visitors arrive to the content page and that this has been determined as the "way forward."

2) Do permalinks to content items not make sense? I firmly believe that the ability to instantly create 1 permenent url for a content page was a huge reason that blogging software and CMS's in general have become so powerful. Not only does it create a simple and easy to understand data structure but it allows for your content to be linked to permenantly as well. If that content is located at 3 seperate url's those incoming links are divided by 3, making the pages less likely to be found and thus less useful to the creator and the potential visitor.

I guess I just don't understand how it's useful to have a "read more..." link not point to the same page as an archive link to the same content. Who does this help? What is the benifit to the site developer or end user?

The concept of PermaLink is great but I should mention that it should be able to change it!...like the melting permafrost
Chnaging a permalink should generate a record  in a redirect database, so when someone will visit, vill get redirected. Using 301 will be SE safe.

Can you clarify that.(code:text ratio)

Its often thought that having a website with very little code (lots of css) is better for SEO.

For example, check the page source for these sites:

Yahoo (lot of code)
Google (very sparse code)

In plain words that means ==>
The "text" in your pages is what matters and not the code that shows the text.
Am I right ?

Yes - so clean code with little code doesn't matter for SEO as much as we thought.

However, Google does like quick sites and sites will good coding will load faster.

Is Joomla!'s performance in this regard satisfactory ?

Yes, but as always you'll want to be careful on how many modules you put on the frontpage, especially of the gallery/calendar genre. If the loading time is acceptable to you, then you should be fine.

Yep - theres a million reasons to have a low code-to-text ratio.

All Google's saying is that theres no active SEO penalty for it.

Thanks guys for the replies, I know a little HTML but no idea about CSS and PHP, is that tough ?