Quite a few people have been asking lately about the benefits of using Google SiteSearch.
In theory, it’s great idea because people can use Google’s own search engine to search your site without leaving it. There’s even a slick module that allows you do this easily on Joomla 1.5. This should produce more accurate results, right?
Wrong. Here’s six reasons why you’re better off using your own site search rather than relying on Google:
In one of a series of guest posts here on the Alledia blog, Kyle Ledbetter of Joomlapraise.com asks whether admin templates are worth the effort.
Over at JoomlaPraise we make Joomla templates and extensions and have recently released AdminPraise, an administrator template for Joomla 1.5 that falls somewhere between a template and extension.
However, the question we’d like to ask is … do Joomla users want/need an alternate admin template? The admin template system is obviously in place for this reason, but no one really uses it. We’ve seen slight variations on the Khepri template, but that’s about it.
This how-to came from a question posed by an SEO Club member:
“How I do move from Joomla 1.0 to 1.5 yet still keep all my /content/view/24/32 URLs?”
I’ve talked with him before and explained that redirecting URLs to a new version is a disaster. My experience it brings a 30 to 50% drop in traffic, so keeping these old URLs was vital.
I did some digging around and found the Backlink plugin. This is a great little tool that is almost completely unknown. I found only around 10 Joomla forum posts and a single blog entry about it which has since disappeared from Joomla.org. Fortunately I was able to dig out the Google cache of Sam Moffatt’s post which helped me understand how it worked. It’s really pretty simple, once you’ve migrated the content to 1.5:
Continue reading “Moving Joomla 1.0 Default SEF URLs to 1.5”
This is a sponsored review from errr .. SponsoredReviews.com.
I don’t do many of these before, but I’m working late, watching a soccer / football games to start and doing a review seems like fun. There are several
requests waiting so it only seemed fair to tackle the first one in the
list … Forums-Free.com.
The site is, as the name implies, a free forum hosting website. It allows you to create forum boards with phpBB3. Its a free forum but is it any good?
If you don’t want pages to indexed by search engines, it’s standard SEO practice to add rel=”nofollow” on links to that page. Pages you might not want indexed include “Terms and Conditions”, “Privacy Policy” and other pages that contains content you don’t want to rank for.
However, inside Joomla core, nofollow is not an option for menu links. At the request of some SEO Club members, and with some smart help from Brian Teeman, we’ve modified the Joomla menu module to allow no-following of links.
Simple – to make it easier to upgrade. With hack attempts rising lately, its important to upgrade as smoothly and easily as possible.
No. They add the no-follow to the metadata of the page being linked to. This actually adds no-follow to the menu link itself. Click here for more details on the differences between no follow, meta no follow and robots.txt.
Almost a year ago now we launched the Joomla SEO Club. It was a completely new concept at the time and for the last 11 months, I’ve been focused on making it flourish. I believe we’ve succeeded. Almost no-one was offering Joomla SEO services last year and now it’s a standard offering by many companies in the Joomla industry.
Now it’s time to see if we can push the envelope once more and help meet other unaddressed customer needs. Starting today and continuing for the next few weeks, we plan to launch three significant new ventures here at Alledia.
The first project is a large series of Joomla training classes.
From September to December, we’ll be running “Twelve Weeks of Training”, an ambitious program to provide Joomla! training across the Eastern and Mid-Western United States. We’ve already run classes in Chicago and Atlanta. Now it’s time for nine more cities.
Like the SEO Club, success isn’t guaranteed but we’ve planned carefully with former teachers leading the classes, and hopefully if we do make it work it will be much easier for people to find hands-on Joomla training in future.
Happy Birthday Joomla!
September 1st is the project’s 3rd birthday. You can read the original announcement from 2005 here.
Only 10 days previously the domain name had been registered alongside several other alternatives that the team were considering.
How far has the project come? We’re now reaching the point where a several percent of all the sites on the web are built with Open Source Content Management Systems. At the beginning of 2004, our industry barely existed:
We’re delighted to announce three new areas in Extension Guides, our freshly-added 6th section to the SEO Club.
These are easy-to-understand articles explaining how to use the most popular Joomla SEO extensions:
The first extension that we covered is sh404SEF and that guide is getting longer and longer, partly that’s because it’s powerful and complex, but also because of great feedback from club members.
This is an worrying security update that affects the Joomla world.
Up until now iDevAffiliate – the system used by almost every Joomla affiliate program – has stored passwords and Social Security numbers UNENCRYPTED in the database.
That means if you join an iDevAffiliate program the owner can go along and view your password whether its “12345”, “password” or something more personal. From there they can go back to your site, see other iDev programs that you’re using and try to login to those, pretending to be you. If you’re dumb enough to use the same login for your email also …
If you subscribe to the Joomla Extensions Directory RSS feed, you can see the future of Joomla pass before your eyes. Sure, there are a lot of "me-too" listings but at least once a week there’s something new and exciting.
The latest extension to catch my eye is an automatic installer and updater. Its key selling point? It allows you to install just one extension and use that install and updates dozens of others. No more registering, downloading, uploading and looking out for updates.
After Joomla’s recent security issues, people have been double-checking their sites. In some cases it’s easy to tell if your site has been hacked (the large Turkish flag and blaring music are strong hints) and on other occasions, the hackers might leave no trace.
One of my colleagues found a very subtle hack … his robots.txt file has been altered to block his entire site from being indexed by Google. The hack had been in place since June, causing him to lose all his rankings. It’s likely that this was a highly motivated rival rather than just another group of script kiddies.
Is it possible to defend against these subtle attacks? In this case, yes.
UPDATED: We have a few tickets sold out our Joomla Training in Atlanta, next weekend, Saturday August 23rd. However, we’ve opened registration for the next class on October 25th. Click here to sign up , and use the coupon "allediablog" for a $50 discount!
In addition to the class, attendees get:
Coming up in December, we’re taking our training to Colorado and early birds get a $200 discount! Read on for more details: