Okay, I use Joomla as a CMS for my political site. I have noticed that my own URLS are very ugly and unreadable, IE (http://www.politicalrundown.com/content/category/88888892/88888892/88888904/) Almost all of my links are like this. I've had my site up for about 3 months, and when I go to google and type in siteoliticalrundown.com the only real link is to my index page. I have submitted a sitemap, I use meta tags/descriptions, I feel like I have original content (although I'm not finished yet). So why am I getting crappy results in Google? Googlebot crawls my page several times weekly, I don't understand why my search results are lacking. Is it possible that Joomla's horrid looking URL's is causing this problem? If so there is an add on for Joomla called "Open SEF" which changes your links to something more friendly. I've tried using it for a while and it seemed kind of buggy and not sure if it helped or not. Should I A) Shutup and stop whining B) Try openSEF again C) be more patient D) you decide... Thanks for help in advance ! =)
Not sure about this but I believe there is a plugin that makes Joomla's URLs search engine friendly, otherwise you need to implement mod rewrite somehow to get readable links
Yeah there is a plugin for Joomla. It's called openSEF. I've tried it before and I'm not too sure if it worked well or not. I almost think I got more visitors after I turned it off. But then again what do I know =). Forgive me for being so noob, but what is mod rewrite?
Dont try it. It is not active for a long time and giving terrible performance problems when your site gets bigger. I already spent 500$ to fix those problems and lost traffic. You need a seo plugin! Once you have your keywords in the url, you will notice better SERP results. Currently my Joomla expert suggest 404sef and used that to fix opensef problems on my site. But i reccomend you to wait 1.5 version (currently beta) of Joomla. There will be some core changes in Joomla related to SEO and i guess it is better to have a clean start for you.
I tried looking for a release date on the Joomla website for 1.5 final but couldn't find anything. Do you have any idea on how long it will take? I Don't want to be waiting for months ya know? So you are using OpenSEF and then using 404SEF to fix the problems caused by OpenSEF?? Or are you just using 404SEF ? Thank you, your post was EXTREMELY informative to me.
SEO with joomla is completely do able.... I use it on ALL of my sites and I do SEO for a living... Check these out for some reference materials (he's a mate O mine); http://seo4joomla.wordpress.com/ http://www.pathos-seo.com/joomlablog/ That should be a good starting point. Plain and simple.. Joomla CAN rock for SEO
I used opensef but when my contetn items reached to thousands, thedatabase started to eat all CPU all the time. So tried to switch to 404sef with manual url mapping.. There were soem mistakes of mine there too. But obviously opensef is dangerous if you want to be big.. And as far as i see, 404sef is not doing mapping automatically in a consistent way at thisstage. This is why i told you to wait 1.5. And i dont know when they will realase 1.5. I did not see anything special in these blogs. Am i correct, there are not more than 20 posts and just talking about known components? But for newbies it can be useful to get some basics. Sure, it is possible. But it is dangerous. I am not saying: dont use joomla. Joomla is good enough but it is better to wait 1.5 if you can. If you cant, i am sure you can find your way by trying the sef components mentioned on the blogs written above.. (But dont be surprised seeing url_rewrite loops when just upgrading a sef component (just happened to me with opensef.) And dont forget, for small site (i guess thegypsy's clients are small enough in terms of number of contents.) the problem may not be observable! I have 5-10 more joomla sites still using opensef without any observable problems. I am waiting 1.5 to have a stable solution. Just my 2 cents.)
I am using drupal and have been noticing the same sorta thing. To fix my problem I am using drupal's "alternate" URL feature" which allows you to make a different file path much shorter than the automatically inserted one. Does joomla not have this option?
I am using 404 SEF for a site that I am working on http://www.homeusersecurity.com and its looking great so far
There is also a "hack" called SEF Patch that will help with SEF title and meta tags. The patch will allow custom title tags on content and different meta tags for each page and category. I call it a hack because the free version does not install like a component. A paid version is available that has more features.
So is the conlusion about CMS/SEo that it is dueable but just harder to due than a non CMS site? Are my search results for google horrid because of openSEF, or just because my site hasnt been around long enough to have adequate search results? JoomSEF I've never heard of it... I'll check it out what featues does it have over 404SEF and OpenSEF? Oseymour have you tried opensEF before using 404 sef?
SEO with joomla is not hard at all and only requires a SEF url component and a title and meta tag component or patch. if you notice your political site carries the same title tag on every page and basically never changes(much). It would be much better if you were able to make each page title unique and match the keywords you were after. So the conclusion is that with 2 patches you can create a joomla site that will perform much better in the SERPS. I know that some people posted comments about issues with large sites but I can not confirm this because my joomla sites are only a few hundred pages.
Holy crap.. I already said Joomla is COMPLETELY SEO friendly. Sure it takes a few components/modules, but it's easy Enough of this banter... need help PM me and I shall set U up.. Joomla is a ROCKING CMS for SEO ... plain and simple
I have had a look at your site. First thing I noticed is that al of your best articles are in the news section... and they are copy's of other articles from other websites. you should bring in more quality content of your own like that, as that is the main factor to get good rankings in Goolge. Goolge is very good at finding duplicate content an ranking the original over others.... So the second thing to do is have a hard look on how you set up the structure of the site, that means Sections and Categories, get a better strucure before going to a SEF Component. Third thing is that You should get a good SEO Template for you site, preferably tabeless design based on CSS. Your site is three months old, so its possible it has to age and ripe with more content. On one site of mine it took 6 months to get a Good position on page one with a competition for 128.000.000 results, so you have to keep working on the content and wait. As for the Technical stuff like SEF URLs, I prefer OpenSEF over the Others out there, and Yes I have tried them all, including the Commercial SEF Advanced. The "hack" of joomlatwork is a great patch, and it's mostly updated in the same week as a new release of Joomla gets out. (still hoping this will get into the core on day) Installation is just an FTP of the files overwriting the Core files. As for preformance trouble with OpenSEF on large sites (yours it not one of them) the new version of OpenSEF RC6 (not released yet) is said it needs only two queries to get the job done. If you need to optimize Joomla for performance there are other things to consider as well. Back to your site, Pictures, Cartoons and Videos, will not get you very high in Google although I like them... Good Original Text articles on the subject will. Use the h2 and bold headings with keywords in your paragraph's and split up some of the articles. For most people the look scaringly long... Hope this helps you to get more out of you website... and get a better SERP on your keywords Ps. Take out the Hide statusbar script.... it does not serve any purpose and Google does not like terms like Hide and Hidden...
This is some really great info. I have bookmarked these sites and will review them regularly. I am far from and SEO expert, so a tool like the iJoomla Meta Tag Generator is an awesome tool that I plan on using on one of my sites as an experiment. Thanks for the info once again.
Thanks for the Love... but actually.. HUMMERBIE there (although a nOOb here) is the OWNER of the sites and the hard working guy behind those sites... So PROPs to HB