Joomla 1.5 is definitely going to bring some SEO benefits in the core, including better URLs and no-follow on some key links such as PDFs.
However, the mantra of the Joomla core for 1.5 is simplicity. Those of you who have been testing the Release Candidates have seen that fewer options are available and in a much clearer, easier-to-understand layout.
This means that for more complex SEO efforts we’ll still be relying on extra components. The first one out of the block is likely to be from Richard of Joomlatwork.com, who developed the SEF Patch and who used to be on the OpenSEF team.
In the fine tradition of OpenSEF, Richard has revealed that the component won’t simply produce Search Engine Friendly URLs, but will be a multi-purpose SEO machine:
"We have made a ‘roadmap’ for the URL rewriting tools based on SEO needed aspects. Examples of the functionalities we want to develop are:
- Generating a Google sitemap, therefor you will need an admin tool to manage your urls and the URLs need to be stored within a table.
- Fetching incoming traffic that is from search engines: fetching the keywords how the pages is found and related this to the URL repository and generated reports about this and based on these statistic adjust ‘bad’ ranking URL’s based on the incoming traffic statistics.
- Enabling custom redirects or modules based on the incoming traffic of search engines. Example some one seek for red roses for which he has an hi ranking in Google, but when the visitors comes on his site he also wants to show alternative pages links (for example in a module).
- Reporting modules for the google Adwords (tracking the incoming traffic)
- Enabling 301 redirects in stead of showing a 404 page which removes the pages from the search engine indexes."