Public Forums 71,145 posts

[yamemaru Friend yamemaruJoin date: February 2009Posts: 49Downloads:0Uploads:0 Thanks: 30 Thanked: 1 times in 1 posts]

#139882

I’ve been wanting to redo all my urls to become more search engine friendly. I’m just hesitant to do it because last time I tried doing it using the built in SEO plugin in joomla, it completly messed up all my links.

I mean my urls are just INSANELY long, and I’ve been told I really need to fix them if I want to have better hits from search engines. So here I am, I need some suggestions on how to do all this.

Thanks.

[Arvind Chauhan Moderator Arvind ChauhanJoin date: September 2014Posts: 3835Downloads:74Uploads:92 Thanks: 1240 Thanked: 1334 times in 848 posts]

#299783

<em>@yamemaru 122401 wrote:</em><blockquote>I’ve been wanting to redo all my urls to become more search engine friendly. I’m just hesitant to do it because last time I tried doing it using the built in SEO plugin in joomla, it completly messed up all my links.

I mean my urls are just INSANELY long, and I’ve been told I really need to fix them if I want to have better hits from search engines. So here I am, I need some suggestions on how to do all this.

Thanks.</blockquote>

While turning on the joomla sef, did you also rename the htaccess.txt file to .htaccess?. Joomla inbuilt sef isn’t all that messy. Which template are you using? May be i can try the joomla sef on it and see if it really messes up?

regards

arvind.

1 user says Thank You to Arvind Chauhan for this useful post

1. yamemaru

[yamemaru Friend yamemaruJoin date: February 2009Posts: 49Downloads:0Uploads:0 Thanks: 30 Thanked: 1 times in 1 posts]

#299793

yes I did rename the htaccess to .htaccess,

also I was wondering why people keep saying the built in SEF is no good? people keep telling me to go another route and get a 3rd party SEF.

true or false?

[Arvind Chauhan Moderator Arvind ChauhanJoin date: September 2014Posts: 3835Downloads:74Uploads:92 Thanks: 1240 Thanked: 1334 times in 848 posts]

#299800

<em>@yamemaru 122414 wrote:</em><blockquote>yes I did rename the htaccess to .htaccess,

also I was wondering why people keep saying the built in SEF is no good? people keep telling me to go another route and get a 3rd party SEF.

true or false?</blockquote>

No harm in trying out 3rd party sef, Artio is good but it puts ads in the footer, SH404 is used quite commonly and you can give it a try.

Turning on sef slightly affects the joomla performance but the pro’s are far reqrding then this con.

regards

arvind

1 user says Thank You to Arvind Chauhan for this useful post

1. yamemaru

[yamemaru Friend yamemaruJoin date: February 2009Posts: 49Downloads:0Uploads:0 Thanks: 30 Thanked: 1 times in 1 posts]

#299806

Another question,

Turning on SEF urls, shortens the urls right? how will this effect already placed links of my site on websites? lets say a website links to a article on my website, will the user clicking the link get a 404 error? because the url has been changed and shortened?

[Arvind Chauhan Moderator Arvind ChauhanJoin date: September 2014Posts: 3835Downloads:74Uploads:92 Thanks: 1240 Thanked: 1334 times in 848 posts]

#299807

<em>@yamemaru 122431 wrote:</em><blockquote>Another question,

Turning on SEF urls, shortens the urls right? how will this effect already placed links of my site on websites? lets say a website links to a article on my website, will the user clicking the link get a 404 error? because the url has been changed and shortened?</blockquote>

Guys correct me if i am wrong, but as far as i know, the original lengthy url of joomla will always be functional inspite of you using sef. However, if you put your sef link on other sites and later change to default joomla urls, it will throw 404 error.

You can try it yourself, copy and save a default joomla url, turn on sef and again try the original url to see if it lands on the same page.

let us know too.

regards

arvind

1 user says Thank You to Arvind Chauhan for this useful post

1. yamemaru

[yamemaru Friend yamemaruJoin date: February 2009Posts: 49Downloads:0Uploads:0 Thanks: 30 Thanked: 1 times in 1 posts]

#299808

I am still having troubles deciding whether to use built in SEF or 3rd party. What would you do? and what are the big advantages of the third part ones?

[Arvind Chauhan Moderator Arvind ChauhanJoin date: September 2014Posts: 3835Downloads:74Uploads:92 Thanks: 1240 Thanked: 1334 times in 848 posts]

#299822

<em>@yamemaru 122433 wrote:</em><blockquote>I am still having troubles deciding whether to use built in SEF or 3rd party. What would you do? and what are the big advantages of the third part ones?</blockquote>

Its difficult to advise on the 3rd party sef, in the last tw days on two of my clients site i tried using sh404 but it din work efficiently, had few 404 errors and redirection loops, tried flushing the stored urls and other stuff’s, but it just wont function properly. but uses SH404 on one of my other site and it works great. May be it also depends upon the components used on your joomla site.

Best way to choose is to try them one by one and settle for the one which gives result. Take a complete backup of your site and database to be on safer side.

After all my trials i have settled for joomla inbuilt sef, but that’s a personal preference too, saves me the trouble of upgrading the 3rd party sef components as and when updates are available.
regards

arvind.

1 user says Thank You to Arvind Chauhan for this useful post

1. yamemaru

[mj1256 Friend mj1256Join date: June 2007Posts: 1473Downloads:10Uploads:35 Thanks: 84 Thanked: 225 times in 118 posts]

#299843

As for artio ads in the footer, the commercial version does not do it

I use artio with joomseo plugin, it works great.

Having SEF urls will have little to know effect on your search engine rankings, haveing keywords in your URL has been deprecated by the SE;s because of the spammers,

do it, YES, expect great results, NO

Ranking is about content, content formated correctly, and having your keyword phrases in the right places and format.

If you do not know the rules for search engine ranking, it will not matter what program you use. Either way, you still need to know how to optimize your site for the SE’s

2 users say Thank You to mj1256 for this useful post

1. wooohanetworks
2. yamemaru

[wooohanetworks Friend wooohanetworksJoin date: September 2008Posts: 1239Downloads:0Uploads:2 Thanks: 148 Thanked: 138 times in 41 posts]

#299849

SEF merely only makes your urls look “regular” and readable by humans. What it brings is that people can follow the content via the url but as it was just mentioned, Google crawls your content and the url not like a regular untrained human when it comes to how to interpret an url.

In search engine results for a shop for example, you will always see the title of the page, some content and below the unreadable url. Now if no one else than the the human eye cares or even already awaits some unreadable urls, there is really no need for such SEF tools. As to this, I already see those endless like-masked urls as more interesting than SEF generated urls somehow. Major sites do not SEF theirs, and with good reason, it makes no sense and brings no difference.

Now also when people say, that large sites may use additional search engine marketing, like sponsored ads, and their urls can look that way like they do, non-sef, unreadable and so on, their urls must be SEF, still they should rather keep them how the Joomla generates those, as Google can read those same good and even better as long you do not not also change those at all, like some people only remove certain parts of these thinking it would benefit the rankings etc..

I enjoyed an article posted by a member lately, about this topic on the Google Pages and was quite amazed how many people did not want to hear about that they shall not use SEF Plugins for Joomla and other CMS at all and simply let the urls like they are by default, as this way, without doing anything to it, Google will at least have no problems with reading those correctly, where any slight change may cause problems. Most people did not understand, the rule “Do not change your urls unless you know 100% what you do!” and also those plugins are more causing problems than benefit a site when it comes to Google rankings somehiow.

The worst thing to do, from what was mentioned, was to add session ids to the urls especially when it is not really needed, but this is another topic, lol.

Much success anyway!;)

1 user says Thank You to wooohanetworks for this useful post

1. yamemaru

[yamemaru Friend yamemaruJoin date: February 2009Posts: 49Downloads:0Uploads:0 Thanks: 30 Thanked: 1 times in 1 posts]

#299880

Thanks for all the replies guys. I have decided to use the Built in SEO optimization. I will let you know my results.

[mj1256 Friend mj1256Join date: June 2007Posts: 1473Downloads:10Uploads:35 Thanks: 84 Thanked: 225 times in 118 posts]

#299903

I already know the results

It will have no effect on your ranking

1 user says Thank You to mj1256 for this useful post

1. yamemaru

[bolero1 Friend bolero1Join date: March 2009Posts: 25Downloads:0Uploads:2 Thanked: 2 times in 1 posts]

#299928

Get SH404SEF. That is what you need. It is quite simply brilliant.

But first, create a staging site for your web so you can test ( you should have a staging site for all your sites). I simply create sub domains for staging. This way you can experiment all you want without worrying about breaking anything.

Anyways, if SH404 does not work, you can uninstall it, and all your long ugly URL’s will be back in all of their ugly glory. 😉

1 user says Thank You to bolero1 for this useful post

1. yamemaru

[amin7b5 Friend amin7b5Join date: November 2007Posts: 10Downloads:0Uploads:0 Thanked: 5 times in 4 posts]

#300037

I second SH404SEF. Page titles are important and IMO SH404SEF does a far better job with naming titles by using the article | category | site format.

[Arvind Chauhan Moderator Arvind ChauhanJoin date: September 2014Posts: 3835Downloads:74Uploads:92 Thanks: 1240 Thanked: 1334 times in 848 posts]

#300042

<em>@amin7b5 122704 wrote:</em><blockquote>I second SH404SEF. Page titles are important and IMO SH404SEF does a far better job with naming titles by using the article | category | site format.</blockquote>

That’s the reason why we have so many sef extensions in the JED. Personal preference, experience and usability takes the upper hand in considering the best sef extension on personal levels.

Also i would like to reaffirm that for SEO content quality and keyword optimizaiton matters the most.

Regards

arvind

[Author]

Posts