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.
How to Track Your URLs
The simplest way to do this is to search Google, Yahoo and MSN with a query such as site:alledia.com. Although this is easy, the disadvantage is that its very hard to diagnose problems. Your high-quality pages come first, but the pages you really need to analyse are buried deep within the results or back in the supplemental results.
The easiest and most accurate way to track your URLs is to use a tool. WebCEO have a free version which can be downloaded. We use it to run weekly checks on our client’s sites. The benefit of doing things this way is that you view the URLs in one easily-scannable list. You can sort the URLs by various criteria and compare them.
How to Remove Your Bad URLs
Once you’ve analysed your Joomla URLs and realised which ones need to be removed, there are at least four tools you can use to purge your site of bad URLs:
- Make changes to the Robots.txt file
- Add no-follow to links that we don’t want Google to follow
- Make sure we have unpublished key causes of duplicate content, such as PDF and Print links, RSS feeds and social networking tags.
- In extreme circumstances, we unpublish or remove the component.