Hi there,

I created a site a few month back. It appeared almost instantly in Google index, and showed on first page for several key words we wanted. Everything went well for about 2 months, then site sort of disapeared from Google index. 6 weeks later, it is still so (see it at http://www.holiform.com). Mambo is 4.5.2.3, with 404_SEF. As of today, only 2-3 pages are in the index, and old ones that is. After reading posts through several forums, I came up with the following changes, and I would like to have comments/suggestions as to what else could be done :
1 - Created, submitted and verified a Google Sitemap
2 - The only 'fault' I found I may have done was duplicate contents. It seems that using mambo, it is almost always the case if using SEF and a 'classic' installation. So I did what follows :

a - Added $Itemid = 'XX'; in latestnews.php to have always the same URL for the same news items, whatever page it shows from
b - Changed .htaccess so that mysite.com is permanently redirected (301 redirect) to http://www.mysite.com
c - Changed .htaccess so that http://www.mysite.com/home/ is permanently redirected to http://www.mysite.com (http://www.mysite.com/home/ being the first item in my main menu)
d - Changed includes/pathway.php so that the link to 'home' displayed in the pathway ('Home > News > News #1' for example) is http://www.mysite.com/ instead of http://www.mysite.com/index.php

Question now is :

- is there anything else I could do ?
- What should I do with respect to Google ? let hit do his job and wait, or resubmit a site map ?

Thanks for any advice

I got to be honest that sounds spot on to me.

It's exactly what I was going to do now.

Things I have noticed is that it can take 2-3 weeks for your sitemap to be 'deep crawled'.

My site (not with 404sef) has only really just been deep crawled. It is 6 months old. I dont rank well for my main keywords. I do rank well for 'product' articles though.

You have decent page rank so there is no problem there either.

Have you looked in to the sandbox?

Maybe that has something to do for it?

How are you doing on MSN/Y!?

Can I ask you a few questions? Which .htaccess file did you access? the one in the root of your mambo install?

Also - Maybe the mod would considser something like this a sticky? SEO for Joomla? There's a couple of other things I have done that I could add?

It seems to me that there are actually two separate issues here:

1. Making sure Google can crawl the joomla/mambo site correctly.

I personally like the 404-sef component, and it sounds like you have it at up correctly.

2. Optimizing the site for high search engine placement.

This is an area of a wide range of opinions!  Here are a few things for you to consider:

• How did you choose your keywords /phrases ?
• what were their KEI's?
• How effectively are your keywords being used in the text on your pages?

Let me know if I can assist in any way.

Hi Johnifav !

Try to answer in same order :

1 - Sitemap was submitted on sept. 2, so it's been 10 days. I see no change so far, but I realise it must be too soon. I also noticed that GoogleBot is far by the bot that crawls my site most.
2 - You are right in noting that I have a decent page rank. I sort of forgot it! The funny thing is that my main page is PR4, but if you look it up (enter http://www.holiform.com in Google search box), it does not know it ? there is 0 results !
3 - I would like to look in the sandbox, but how do you do that ?
I believe the reason for kicking me out is duplicate content, because I did have some duplicate content if you look at my first post (holiform.com and http://www.holiform.com for example, even though one would think Google to be smart enough to differentiate that from real duplicate content ?
4 - I am doing very fine on MSN (first page on main key words) and poorly on Y! I believe Yahoo does not crawl my site very much. I submited the site, but I do not have many backlinks
5 - I have only one .htacces, at the root of the mambo install, which happens to be also the root folder of the domain

Looking forward to hearing from you

@jt3 : thanks for your answer and offer for help.

You posted while I was answering to johnyfav. I do agree with your analisys. On 1/, I think Google can access the site fairly well.
With respect to 2/ I know the relation between my content and the keywords I am looking for is not so good yet, and I will work on this.
However, what's happening currently is that the site do not show up at all ! For example, If I search for the 3 words of the content's title of the main page ('bienvenue chez holiform', marked as

in HTML, holiform being in the page