Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

In this section you can read Alledia blog posts about Search Engine Optimization.

Joomlatwork New SEF Component

OpenSEF Will Be Back

OpenSEF Great news for those of you with OpenSEF installed on your sites.

Zorro over at http://nitsche.org blogged about this. Those of you like me with high-school German or less can read the remarkably good translation from Google.

This is great news because OpenSEF is a remarkably useful component that a large number of people still rely on. The attempt to find new developers with NuSEF hasn’t managed to get off the ground.

The new domain (not ready yet) will be http://www.opensef-for-joomla.org and the developers will be Ken McDonald from OpenSEF plus Richard from Joomlatwork.

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Google’s URL Removal Really Works

A few months back, I blogged that Google was becoming more choosy on the pages it crawled and that having a few high-quality pages on a site might be a better strategy than a lot of low-quality pages.

Our suggested solution was to add unwanted URLs and directories to your robots.txt file. However, that’s an imperfect solution because search engines don’t always obey the directions in robots, nor do they act quickly.

Fortunately, there’s a new, improved solution….

Continue reading “Google’s URL Removal Really Works”

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How to Fill the SERPs with Your Company

There’s been a lot of talk recently about how Wikipedia dominates almost every search result delivered by Google:

 

 

It seems the only way to escape Wikipedia’s clutches is to be too unimportant to be included.

 

Recently, I’ve noticed a rival creeping up the rankings ….

Continue reading “How to Fill the SERPs with Your Company”

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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.

Continue reading “Do you know what’s on your Joomla site?”

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Using Robots.txt to Keep Your Joomla Pages Under Control

The technical side of Joomla SEO can be summed up in one sentence: keep your URLs under control.

Joomla really is a powerful tool for creating content-rich websites but its also easy to end up with a whole lot of useless URLs.

In today’s post, we’ll use MosTree as an example of how to manage Joomla URLs, using the wonderful sounding robots.txt file.

Continue reading “Using Robots.txt to Keep Your Joomla Pages Under Control”

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Three Useful SEO Experiments

Regular readers of my blog must think I’m going at bit cuckoo of late, repeatedly quoting from a 20-year old book written by a guy born in 1911.

No apologies – David Ogilvy’s book “Ogilvy on Advertising” is a classic. The man himself spent more time in the research department than on the creative team during his early years. He developed an heavier reliance on research and hard data than almost all his competitors:

Continue reading “Three Useful SEO Experiments”

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Simple Machines Forum, Joomla and SEO Part 3

MoonRay, one of the developers over at Joomlaspan.com has been developing a lot of useful tools for Joomla. We use his Google Translation module on the right side of our site, and it really gets a lot of heavy usage.

 

He uses the Simple Machines-Joomla Bridge on his site and has been kind enough to publish a tutorial, explaining how to overcome metadata problems caused by the integration. You can see the results live at Joomlaspan.

 

Click here to read Moonray’s tutorial

 

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Simple Machines Forum, Joomla and SEO Part 2

 Yesterday we compared the metadata produced by three different forum setups for Joomla sites:

 

  • Simple Machines integrated with Joomla
  • Simple Machines unintegrated with Joomla
  • VBulletin

 

Today, we’re going to take that a step further and see how well these forums suceed in getting the posts indexed. We’ll also see how many of those posts end up in Google’s regular index and how many end up in Google’s supplemental index where most searchers will never find them. (Click here to find out more about the supplemental index.)

How did we calculate these figures?

  • Total Posts. We went to the forum and used their own statistics.
  • Pages Indexed. site: http://forum.joomla.org. This show all your pages indexed by Google.
  • Pages in Supplemental Index. site: http://forum.joomla.org *** -sljktf. This show all your pages in the supplemental index.
  • Percentage of posts compared to indexed pages. The closer this number is to 100, the better.
  • Percentage of indexed pages in the supplemental index. The closer this number is to 0, the better.

 

{moschart id=12}

 

What can we learn from these results?

 

  • Both Joomla.org and Rockettheme.com have a very low percentage of their posts indexed by Google. Both use Simple Machines. Joomlashack also uses SMF has done a great job by getting around three-fourths of its posts indexed.
  • It seems clear that a well set up VBulletin forum does a better job of keeping pages out of Google’s supplemental index although it is far from a cure-all as Joomlart’s results show.

 

Without knowing more about the technical aspects of the various sites its hard to diagnose what is causing the differences. However, these tests are important ones that you can run regularly. There is nothing wrong with having pages in the supplemental index, nor with not having 100% of your pages indexed. However, you do need to test often in order to make sure that your site is moving in the right direction. A sudden shift of 10% of your pages into the supplemental index can have a huge affect on your earnings.

 

Finally, full disclosure – this is where Alledia.com stands. Bear in mind that our site should be doing better than a forum, because it is much easier to keep regular content pages out of the supplemental index, compared to forum pages:

  • Pages Indexed. 706
  • Pages in Supplemental Index. 204
  • Percentage of indexed pages in the supplemental index. 28%

 

Read MoreSimple Machines Forum, Joomla and SEO Part 2