In the last few days, the Joomla SEO and Bloggers community have been writing a lot about two posts on the Official Webmaster Blog.
Two posts, one about Demystifying the "duplicate content penalty" and the other on Dynamic URLs vs. static URLs.

From a Joomla webmaster point of view, these items look as if they would turn the world of Joomla SEO upside down…
Yes, Joomla can produce multiple URLs that pint to just one content item and Yes, Joomla is a Content Management System and thus will produce Dynamic URLs.
So it seems only natural that Joomla webmasters and Joomla SEO Specialists will read and react on these posts.

Duplicate Content Issues

So lets see what people are writing, first is Arno Zijlstra on his Joomla Blog , he wrote a short post pointing to the first Google webmasters Blog and About how Google thinks about Joomla! and duplicate content which is followed by some fine comments by Steve from Alledia and I really like the comment of Johan Janssens "Finally ! Been fighting this fight for 3 years now …".

Which is really true and people think multiple URLs to one article is a bad thing from Joomla!, but also WordPress and Drupal will do the same.

But as Adam Lasnik already wrote in 2006 Deftly dealing with duplicate content Google does a good job on filtering the best link to an article itself. (That article has some tips on how to improve things from a search engine point of view)
Vanessa Fox did a kind of follow up on that post also on Duplicate Content also giving pointers to help your site to get better SERP results.

Duplicate content is not the same as having different URLs pointing to the same article, most certainly not if the links are on the same domain! Duplicate content is if you publish your articles on more domains, or use the same text on multiple pages on your site.
See the difference? Multiple pages, not multiple URLs.

Steve did a piece on Joomla and Duplicate Content also in 2007 and I did write some articles about it on my other Blog like Simple things to avoid duplicate content , but the best post was this one on The Duplicate Content Penalty Myth (That Title was close to the Google’s blog….back in 2007)
Quote "I’m here to tell you that there is no such thing as a search engine penalty for duplicate content. At least not the way many people believe there is. " … now where did I read something similar…?

Also Barrie North wrote a piece about this Joomla duplicate content issue, also pointing to different URLs and the problem about diluting pagerank between those URLs.
Which brings us back to the second posts from Google’s webmaster Blog.

Dynamic URLs vs. static URLs

Joomla in standard installation has URLs filled with parameters, Google is now saying that you can just leave them as it is…or not?
Well no, they are telling you that if you want to do rewrites of your URLs to do it the right way, which means make sure that you have one URL pointing to your article.
O, and just to point out one thing… did anyone notice that the Google webmaster Blog itself rewrites their URL to a Keyword rich one?
Or should I assume that they write there pages in a pure static HTML version?

Looking at this post and some of the examples given, it seems that there are some Cms systems out there that really stuff there URLs with a lot of parameters and adding parameters each time new content is added.
But that is not the case with Joomla, Joomla sites with the basic URLs can get good results in the SERPs but in my opinion and based on my experience that once that are using URLs rewrites are doing even better.

As confusing these two posts can be, they also have some great information on how Google robots and indexing is done.
And no, Google is not the only search engine robot out getting your links, Yahoo and Live can also bring in some traffic.
More importantly, people tend to click on better looking URLs more often because they recognize the topic keywords.

So what to do with your Joomla! site?

For me this is simple, if you already have good rankings, keep doing what you do the way you are doing it now.
Changing URLs now based on the Dynamic URLs vs Static URLs post will surely drop your results.

If you are setting up a new Joomla site make sure you use a SEF Component like sh404SEF that will point all duplicate URLs to just one URL and will send a proper 301 redirect from the standard Joomla URL to the SEF one.
One other point why you should use sh404SEF is that it will give Google a real 404 code on a 404 page and thus cleaning up duplicate URLs over time.

I addition to the sh404SEF component, make sure that you have a Google / Yahoo / Live, oké , oké a sitemap.org complaint sitemap.xml file (ore equivalent) that holds the URLs produced by the SEF component.
That way the search engines will know what URL you think is the best if they find duplicate URLs.
Don’t forget to set that path in your robots.txt.

Conclusion 

Read the Google webmaster posts and read them carefully, also read some of the comments.
They indeed can be very confusing and send you in the wrong direction as some other Google information looks like it is contradicting to what is written.
Maybe they should follow a short course from Brain Clark on how to write clearly on a technical subject.

Am I changing my advice on SEO on Joomla and WordPress? No! I have seen sites go from page 150 to page 1 on their targeted keywords just by rewriting their URLs.
But if you want to give it a try, just shut down your SEF options, wait for a few weeks and see what happens.
Then please come back here and put your experience in the comments, I would love to read about them then I always look forward to reading about a nice experiment.

Tags

Joomla Seo, SEF, SEO

Want to read more about this topic? See Joomla , WordPress & SEO

First off, search engine friendly is not the same as search engine optimized!
This is something Joost de Valk already wrote about in his post Search Engine Friendly vs Search Engine Optimized

Search engine optimization does go a lot further then making a search engine friendly website, and building a Content Management system for websites that is search engine optimized…, that is just not possible…

What is possible is to look at the search engine friendliness of three popular Open Source CM systems.
Basics for this comparison are the options necessary that are in the system itself and not those things that can by done with Content, Images, Layout or other aspects.
So no info about H1 or H2, no alt or title tags for images and more.
No, you can read here about:

• The possibility to influence the HTML title separate from the content title
• The possibility to use the Metatags like Description and Keywords on individual content items
• Create search engine friendly URLs, preferably with keywords in it, or other wise with as little possible use of parameters like id_?=12 or similar.

For all three system’s the comparison is with the following technical hosting specification:

• Linux (UNIX) based hosting
• PHP 4 or PHP 5
• Apache webserver with Mod_Rewrite active

WordPress, Drupal en Joomla

WordPress

• URL Rewrite is easy to realize with the ”Permalink” option, WordPress can set the right .htaccess options in the file if the file is writable. My own mostly used option is to use the custom option /%postname%/ with which the post title is also the URL. You can change the URL by changing the text in the “Post Slug” option.
• Title is naturally  the standard title of your post, but you want more control on the option for search engine, that is why your could use the  SEO Title tag plugin with just a minor change in your template.
• Metatags in a basic WordPress installation there is no possibility to change the ”Description” and ”Keywords” per post or page. With the All-in-one-SEO-Pack plugin you will have all these options. You can also change the Title with this plugin, but I like the overview and options that SEO Title tag will give you.
  You can use both plugins at the same time if you disable the title rewrite option in All-in-one-SEO-Pack

Tip: Use the optional excerpt function to generate the Meta description, that will also give you better archive pages, since most of the templates use that data for the archive page creation.

Drupal

• URL rewrite in Drupal you need to use the site configuration option “Clean URLs” that also can change your .htaccess file if it is writable. But that just changes your URL to /node/1/ instead off q=1. And you need more…. That is why you need to install the ”pathauto” module and you activate the modules “path” and “pathauto”.
• Title this is just as with the other just the title of your content item, but with the Page Title module you just have a little more control about the title tag, but not a lot.
• Metatags in the standard installation of Drupal this option is also not available, but with the Meta Tags Nodeword module you will get that possibility.

Tip: Set in the Pathauto module in the general settings the option at “Update action” to “Do Nothing” with this option you will later have the possibility to change the title without changing the URL.

Joomla 1.0

• URL rewrite in version 1.0.x of Joomla there is an SEO option in the main configuration screen, a standard htaccess.txt file is included in the package en needs to be renamed to .htaccess. With this option enabled URLs are made on the base of ID numbers like Domain-name/12/25/3/, but here you also want more… that is why you should install a SEF Component like sh404SEF that will give you much better URLs. And it will give you a good 404 error page that will also uses a proper 404 header. (Joomla standard will give an 200 OK and redirects you to the Homepage…)
• Title with the same SEF component you will get the opportunity to use the title alias function for you URL so you can use your normal article title for you optimization. For an optimal use of titles, and also for your menu items, you can use the SEF Patch of Joomlatwork , there is also a paid version that will give you a separate HTML Title option for more control like the WordPress SEO Title plugin.
• Metatags the description and keyword options are already in a standard Joomla incorporated for each article, but not for menu items, you will have to get the above mentioned SEF Patch to use that.

Tip: Choose with any SEF component you use alway the option /category/title and not /section/category/title to get a little shorter URLs. /title/ alone is also a possibility but not as good, because you can run into trouble like things like /Drupal/installation manual.HTML and /WordPress/installation manual.HTML (Drupal en WordPress are here been used as categories)

Joomla 1.5

• URL Rewrite is in Joomla 1.5 done with the SEO settings in your Global configuration, but you have now three options, unfortunately in each of those options, there is always an item ID number in the URL.
  • SEF on, will give you directly URLs with the title in it, but with index.php in the URL. (can also be used on windows hosting)
  • SEF with the use of .htaccess, this will also give you the URL with title, but than without the index.php
  • Use suffix, this options sets a .HTML at the end of your URL
  • Attention! Joomla 1.5 uses the title alias, but you have to set the ”-” between the words in your URL options, otherwise you will get a %20% in your URL if you leave it blank.
• Title here Joomla will use the standard article title, if your want more control, than you can use the new Joomla 1.5 SEF patch from Joomlatwork.com (Dutchies ;-)) and I have to add here that Richard of Joomlatwork already has stated that the SEF patch will be update with each release until it is in the Joomla core!
  If you use the SEF patch you get an extra SEO tab in your configuration screen, don’t forget to set the minimal [TITLE] option, otherwise your title will show your URL as title.
• Metatags are also like the “old” Joomla version built-in for articles and site wide via your Global configuration. But like with the old version, here is the same advice to get more control use the SEF patch of Joomlatwork.com .

Tip: For both versions of Joomla versions an advice, do not use the Global Metatag settings! With version 1.0.x you will get the text of the Globals on top of the page Metatags which will leave you with pretty much the same Metatags in the search engines as snippets, version 1.5 does this a lot better, and will not fill it with the standard if you use the page description.However is does set this if the page description is empty…

Conclusion: None of the three is out-of-the-box ready as search engine friendly Content Management system. With all three there needs to be done some extra work to realize the desired options.

For me they all have there own usage:

• WordPress works great for smaller websites and even bigger Blogs
• Joomla is fine for SMB websites and, with some extra extensions can be used for bigger sites as well.
  Especially the easy and user friendliness is great for less “technical” webmasters.
• Drupal can do almost everything, but for me is somewhat staying behind the others because of the lack of user friendliness for those who have the maintain and edit the page content.

But the most important factor in the choice of system is still what your customer wants and the ease of use for him/her… if the site has to become a success, then it must by their website, and to achieve that they have to be able to easily maintain the site themselves!
For search engine optimization…, well, that is why there are specialists, those who will look at the details… and each of them will have there own preferences for a certain system.

O yes, tips and  other options… the comments are open :-)

Tags

Drupal, Joomla, SEF, SEO, WordPress

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If you run a Joomla or WordPress Based website, you are of course constantly creating quality content for your users.
Writing the best Titles like www.copyblogger.com told you how to do.

But there are several options in Joomla, and with the right Plugin you get something similar in WordPress.

If you create new content in Joomla, you find yourself with two Title options:

The Title and the Title Alias.

The first option is what is going to be the title of you page and is show as a content header.
The second option is not shown anywhere on the page.. so what’s the use of this option?

Most SEF Components have the possibility to use this alias as the base for there URL rewrite.
So you can have an Title that says:
“The best Content Management System, Joomla or WordPress”
but the alias is written ”Joomla or WordPress CMS”
With the use of the alias, you URL is going to be http://www.example.com/joomla-or-wordpress-cms.html
instead of the longer title based version

http://www.example.com/The-best-Content-Management-System-Joomla-or-WordPress

But with the paid version of Joomla SEF Patch by www.joomlatwork.com you get a second title option:

The HTML Title

Now this title is the one that gets indexed by Google and other Search Engines… this is (after good content) the number one Search Engine Optimization tool.

With a standard Joomla installation, you content title is also the HTML title.
But you might want to keep the content titles short, and the HTML titles extended with some extra keywords…!!

This functionality is also integrated in the latest version of JoomSEF, in the edit URL section.

The Title Options in WordPress

You may not be aware of it yet, but there are similar functions in WordPress.
Just start writing you post, and you are editing your Post Title, which (if you have permalinks enabled) becomes the content of your URL as well.

But there is this nice option in WordPress that is called “Post Slug”

Here is where you can change the URL that is used for you Post, especially useful if you have a long post title..
Just shorten you Post slug and the URL will be much shorter and easier to pickup.

And with the right Plugin you also have the possibility to change your HTML Title, or as some call it, you SEO Title.
There are two Plugins that can do that for you:
The SEO Title Tag Plugin which is great for rewriting titles in bulk, and for page titles rewrites, and the best part is, you can use it in combination with the next Plugin.

This Plugin not only gives you the HTML title rewrite option, but also the best way to insert Metatags like keywords, and with the use of the “Optional Excerpt” to fill the MetaTag description.
This Plugin is really the All in One SEO Pack for WordPress and this one is a must have for Search Engine Optimization.

It does even more than just the Title rewrite as you can see.
It can even fill your Metatag Description automatically with the first words from your post…

If you want to use it with the SEO Title Tag Plugin, just untick the Rewrite Titles and the Titles from your other Plugin are used.
So if you are starting a WordPress Blog, go for this Plugin form the start and you will do allright.

Title use Conclusion

The HTML Title tag is very important for your Search Engine Optimization.
Not only should it be written to draw people to your website, it also should contain your targeted keywords.

With the options I mentioned above, you have now the possibilities to extend the power of the HTML Title tag beyond your post title and keeping your URL short as well.

Make good use of it, and don’t forget to write some keywords, but even more important, write very good excerpts of you post and content in you description tags.
Because in essence they are small adverts for you page that show up in the SERP Pages of the mayor Search Engines.
So work extra hard to create those descriptions.

Tags

Blogging, Joomla, Joomla Seo, Optimization, Search Engine, SEF, SEO, SEO Optimization, WordPress

Want to read more about this topic? See Joomla , WordPress & SEO

I like Joomla, Drupal, WordPress and Typo3, all Open Source Content Management Systems.
But which ones are Search Engine Friendly? Or are they Search Engine Optimized?

To be honest, Joomla in the latest version 1.0.12 is not Search Engine Friendly, the new Beta 1.5 version is much more Friendly from a Search Engine Point of view.
For the current version you have a lot of work to do before its Friendly enough.
Drupal and Typo3 are already more SEF, and WordPress is the easiest to work with if it comes to creating and using a Search Engine Friendly system.

So Joomla is the worst at the moment, but I love it because its so easy to work with from a content creation point of view.
Besides that, there are a lot of free components, modules and Plugins that can help you in making it SEF.

Search Engine Friendly and Search Engine Optimized 

Did you notice, I never said any of them being Search Engine Optimized…
That is because I totally agree with Joost van der Valk in his post on Search Engine Friendly vs Search Engine Optimized

Also the post that inspired him by Joe Dolson is a great read on the topic of SEO versus SEF, which in turn was written as a reply to a post by Stony de Gruyter.

Then Gary of Phoenixrealm wrote a Post on Content Management Systems and SEF and SEO to point to the make sure that your CMS of choice should be Search Engine Friendly.

But just a Search Engine Friendly Content Management System doesn´t mean its Optimized!
Some Buro´s think just making your site SEF is enough to make it Optimized… no way..
As Joost pointed out, Optimization takes a lot more effort then just making a website completely search engine friendly.
Optimization is in the details, in the little things and learning from tracking and evaluating your changes and there effects.

Search Engine Optimization is delicate work and you need a lot of knowledge to get the job done.
Its also not a static one-time effort, it takes a lot more than just that to get good ranking and stay on top with your results.
So why waste the SEO´s time to make a site Friendly?

Educate the designers and Site builders

Just make sure that your site builders and designers have a basic knowledge about Search Engine Optimization to get the best results if your have to hire an Professional Search Engine Optimizer!

The basics are not that difficult to learn, like the comment op the post of Joost by Ruben Timmerman mentioning that a web developer should know that the title tag of each page should be into the H1 tag.
It should be basic knownledge of your designer on how to work these things into there designs.

There are companies out on the web promoting there SEO Services who don’t have a clue what SEO really is.
I have seen some websites from “Search Engine Optimization” firms that are so NOT optimized that I would never give them that part of business..

But the main thing is, looking at those content management systems that they all use templates.
Templates designed by Professional designers, who have no clue about Search Engine Optimization.

So its not just the developer that needs to be educated, please focus on the designers as well!
They are the ones that can make the efforts of your Optimizer much easier, by already creating Templates that need little to no work the make the site Search Engine Friendly.

Not only for Joomla, Drupal and Typo3 websites, but also for WordPress, as there are some Themes that need to be worked at to make them Search Engine Optimized…
And as Joost pointed out, those are just the simple mistakes that need to be corrected to make you website Optimized for Search Engines.

Tags

Joomla, Joomla Seo, Optimization, Search Engine, SEF, SEO, SEO Optimization, Webdesign, WordPress

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