Steve’s Blog

Do you know what’s on your Joomla site?

If I could sum up Joomla SEO in the shortest possible way, it would be "control your URLs".

Over the course of analyzing many Joomla sites, I’ve seen all sorts of wierd URLs. Sometimes it will be a third part extension creating them,  sometimes it will be an internal Joomla flaw, sometimes it will just remain inexplicable.

This is a problem, because if you have a lot of extra URLs, Google is likely to reduce its indexing of your site.

Fortunately, knowledge is power and if you know what problems you have, they are not to difficult to solve. In today’s post, I’ll show you how to find out what URLs your Joomla site is producing and then how to deal with any problems.

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Key Questions for the Joomla Project

For those of you that haven’t read it yet, there’s a fascinating post over on the Joomla forums, that touches on many crucial questions for the project.

The thread started innocuously when one member posted a “Things I don’t like about Joomla” list. In trying to answer them, lead developer Johan Jansseens mentioned that, “Encryption of Joomla! extensions is a violation of the GPL”.  This generated more questions than it answered, because many Joomla components are encrypted and thus potentially violating the Joomla! license.

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Win SEO Book and SEF Advance at JoomlaJuice.com

Joomla JuicePete Russell over at Joomla! Juice! is running a competition where two lucky prize winners will win a copy of our Joomla SEO e-Book worth $37 US plus a copy of Emir Sakic’s SEF Advance Component valued at $54 US.

 

To win this bundle of SEO/SEF prizes valued at about $91 US, just head over to JoomlaJuice.com. While you’re over there, don’t forget to subscribe to Pete’s excellent weekly podcasts from people in the Joomla community. I’ll be on in a future episode, announcing the winner of this competition.

 

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Joomla Template Links Don’t Work

One of the most interesting things about working for clients is that they’ll ask questions I don’t know the answer to. This happened last week. The question was:

 

"I have lots of incoming links from templates that we sell. That must help us to rank well…"

 

Of course, lots of companies add a link back to their own site from templates that they sell or give away. For some companies, this can add up to 1000s of incoming links. However, my immediate instinct was to say "no". That gut reaction was based on two factors:

  1. If the links did help them rank well, the client wouldn’t be talking to me
  2. Search Engines generally don’t enjoy seeing hundreds of repetitive links with the same anchor text, because they are so easy to spam.

However, I didn’t know for sure and didn’t have any evidence to back up my claims. So, in this post I’ll answer the question, "Do Joomla template links work?"

 

Read on and find out the answer…

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Joomla Blogging Options

Update: This review is out-of-date. Try Joomlify.com for a great WordPress and Joomla integration.

Joomla WordPressLast week talked about how having a blog hosted on your site can be a important SEO tool for your Joomla site.

This week, we’ve gone on to talk about blogging with a default Joomla set-up and with the commercial MyBlog component. Both of them are strong options.

Today, we’re going to look at a third useful way to blog with Joomla – OpenWP from J-Prosolution.com.

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