Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Now that Joomla has been around for 18 months, some of its forums are starting to get pretty big. They are becoming potentially huge SEO assets for the accompanying websites. Although not comprehensive, this is a list of some of the biggest Joomla forums:

• Joomla.org: 720,130 Posts (SMF – not integrated)
• Joomla.de: 390,000 Posts (VBulletin)
• Rockettheme.com: 42,377 Posts (SMF – integrated)
• Joomla.fr: 27,035 Posts (VBulletin)
• Joomlashack.com: 17,166 Posts (SMF – integrated)
• Mosets.com: 16,166 Posts (VBulletin)
• J-Prosolution.com: 13,292 Posts (VBulletin)
• Joomlart.com: 9,109 Posts (VBulletin)

One thing that immediately becomes evident is that only two of these eight forums are actually integrated into Joomla.

Search for the Rockettheme.com forums and the results are had to distinguish from each other:

If you search for the Joomlashack.com forums and you get similar results.

On the other hand, the Joomla.org forums are also built with Simple Machines but they aren’t integrated into Joomla and they don’t have the same problems with metadata:

The Mosets.com forums are built with VBulletin and are not integrated into Joomla:

Clearly the forums that aren’t integrated into Joomla produce much better metadata. If the Simple Machines Bridge wants to become a more popular, a solution will need to be found for the lack of meta titles, descriptions and keywords. Those sites using the Bridge aren’t getting the maximum possible SEO benefit from their large forums. Also, its likely that the click-through rate is lower for these pages because the visitors who find them in Google don’t have a clear idea about what they’ll find when they click.

Tomorrow, in Part 2, we’ll take a closer look at other SEO aspects of forums inside and outside of Joomla.

In the last couple of weeks, we’ve heard the great news that the default version of Joomla 1.5 will produce more Search Engine Friendly URLs than the current package.

The forum post has turned from happiness to suggestions about what the new URLs should look like.

One of the key questions was whether underscores should remain in the URL or if dashes would be better.

Should URLs be www.joomla.com/1.5-is-now-out or should it be www.joomla.com/1.5_is_now_out ?

The answer is simple: 

• Dashes are better for searching. Matt Cutts, the Google engineer, gives a technical explanation of this on his blog.
• Dashes are better for readability. As Ken, the developer of Open-SEF points out, underscores are much harder to read, especially if they are in a link that is underlined.
• Dashes are actually used in English. See if you can name 10 English words with a – in them. Now see if you can name 10 English words with an _.

If you have a well-established site using underscores, is it worth moving over? Probably not, because of all the time it would take to reindex your site, but for all new sites, dashes are definitely the best bet.

Proof of this idea can be found with three simple searches:

• search engine friendly     26,300,000 Google results
• search-engine-friendly     1,530,000 Google results
• search_engine_friendly     476 Google results

A short and sweet post today, following up yesterday’s discussion about making your Joomla site smaller and faster.  Someone over at Digg recently pointed out that if Digg made one small change they could save thousands of dollars in hosting costs ever year.

That change is to send out webpages in a compressed format. When you get a Joomla component it is often contained in a zip file. This enables the file to be much smaller without damaging the content in any way. You can do the same thing with webpages. In Joomla you just need to click “Yes” in the following place:

Site => Global Configuration => Server => GZIP Page Compression => Yes

Theres also a great test to find out how much your site will benefit. According to WhatsMyIP.org, Alledia.com shrinks from 47k down to just 9k when GZip is enabled. Some major sites are compressed such as YouTube.com, MySpace.com, CNN.com and Bebo.com. Others have still not made the leap:

These are the 20 most popular sites worldwide, according the Alexa.com. Only four of the twenty don’t use GZip and three are owned by Microsoft:

• Yahoo.com – Yes
• MSN.com – No
• YouTube.com – Yes
• Baidu.com – Yes
• MySpace.com – Yes
• Live.com – No
• Orkut.com – Yes
• QQ.com – Yes
• Yahoo.co.jp – No
• Wikipedia.org – Yes
• Sina.com.cn – Yes
• EBay.com – Yes
• Microsoft.com – No
• Blogger.com – Yes
• Megaupload.com – Yes
• Sohu.com – Yes
• 163.com – Yes
• Google.co.uk – Yes
• Hi5.com – Yes

What’s the one crucial Search Engine Optimization mistake made by many of the most prominent Joomla sites?

Mistake: Mis-using Global Configuration metadata. In the last few weeks I’ve seen many websites harm their SEO chances by having the same description and same keywords for every page.

Its tempting to fill in those boxes, but think about it this way….Is there really a description and keyword set that can apply to every page on your site? Does you frontpage really contain the same information as your site map?  Does your "Contact Us" page really merit the same description as your forum pages?

Every template club I visited made this mistake. One of them (no names) has 516 keywords, each one of them appearing on every page. 16 might be a better number. Needless to say, I couldn’t find them ranking for even one important keyphrase.

Oh – and Joomla.org makes this error throughout its Main, News and Help pages.

You’ll be amazed how many times you see the following source code:

<meta name="description" content="Joomla! – Content Management System and Web Application Framework" />

<meta name="keywords" content="Joomla, joomla, Joomla!, joomla!" />

Solution: Leave your Global Configuration Metadata empty. Apply unique metadata to each page.

1. Using your keyword list as a meta title. "Dogs, Boarding, Grooming, Pets, Pooches, Kennels, Food" is not a decent meta title because search engines see these as separate keywords. Dog Boarding – Dog Grooming – Dog Kennels is much better.
2. Not redirecting the www and non-www versions of your site to the same place. Barrie North blogged about this recently and provided an easy .htaccess hack to avoid this.
3. Not checking to see how many pages you have indexed in Google, MSN and Yahoo. This is a simple way to test for potential crawling problems. We had one client recently with 2,000 Google pages, 16,000 in Yahoo and 24 in MSN. Something was amiss.
4. Treating headlines as an afterthought. David Ogilvy wrote that once only 20% of people read past the headline of an advertisement, so that you’ve spent 80 cents of your dollar once you’ve written it. This story about Wikipedia made the frontpage of Digg and Reddit on the same day with the headline: "U.S. senator: It’s time to ban Wikipedia in schools, libraries." The story was almost nothing to do with Wikipedia but smart headline writing led to plenty of new traffic.
5. Being lulled into a false sense of security by Joomla. "It works right out-of-the-box! I don’t need to worry about extra SEO!" Ron Liskey posted about this attitude on the Joomla! forums with regard to security. Do install an extra SEF URL component. Do consider something like Joomlatwork’s SEF patch. Do use Octagate’s SiteTimer to pinpoint modules, code and images that are slowing your site down. Do use external statistics such as Google Analytics to track your visitors and conversion rates.
6. Wasting your site’s link juice with social bookmarking links, technorati tags, RSS Feeds for every component, print and PDF buttons and anything else that is cluttering up your page. Lets face it…..You’re not going to get Dugg. If you’re lucky people may subscribe to ONE of your RSS feeds – the rest are junk. Your Technorati tags are making those guys rich but bleeding your site’s authority away. No-one downloads your pages as a PDF. On the other hand, your visitors and search engines do appreciate clean, uncluttered pages. More signal, less noise as those Web 2.0 folks say.

One of the questions I get asked most frequently during SEO work is, "Which component should I use for search engine-friendly URLs with Joomla?"

There are currently three available:

• Open-SEF from J-Prosolution.com (Free)
• Artio SEF from Artio.cz (Free)
• SEF Advance from Sakic.net (40 Euros)

Its not easy for many people to understand the differences between them and to my knowledge no-one has currently written an adequate comparison of all three (if they have – I’ll be happy to link to it, if they haven’t – I’ll write one for an upcoming post).

So, without a detailed list of the pros and cons, and assuming that price is not an obstacle, how can you decide between these three?

Its simple – there is no right answer for every site: Your SEF URL choice should be decided by your key component.

SEF solutions work by adding an extra file called "sef_ext.php" to each component. Unfortunately an sef_ext.php that works for one solution may not work for others. That means that Community Builder would need three different files to enable it to work with each SEF URL solution. Needless to say most developers can’t keep up with all three, and the writers of the SEF URL solutions can’t keep up with the multitude of new components being released. Inevitably your choice won’t work with all the components you use, so you need to focus on the functionality that is most important to you.

For example, SEF Advance produces great URLs for Community Builder, but Open-SEF is a much better choice for Virtuemart. Neither of them work well for Joomlaboard or the SMF bridge and so if you have an important forum you need ArtioSEF.

In short, if you’re building a social networking site, use SEF Advance, if you’re building an ecommerce site, use Open-SEF, if your forum will be key, use Artio SEF and so on…. 

The following is a work in progress, that will help people work out which components are compatible with SEF URL solutions. There may be mistakes and there are definitely plenty of exclusions, so feel free to post more details in the comments section and I’ll add them to this table. As time goes on, I’ll also be working on adding more components and more details:

{moschart id=10}

Links to the SEF solutions’ own lists of components they are compatible with:

• Open-SEF
• SEF Advance
• Artio SEF

Link to a comparison of MySQL queries made by the different components (disclaimer – written by one of the OpenSEF developers):

• MySQL comparison

Today’s post could really be called Duplicate Content in Joomla Part 2. Yesterday, I blogged about duplicate content in Joomla and the damage it can do to your SEO efforts. Well, soon afterwards I realised that a follow-up was needed after reading a post on Aaron Wall’s blog about how he helped another blogger increase his Google traffic by 1400% in a month by reducing the number of pages he had indexed.

Whats the Problem?

As can be seen by this post on the Joomla forums, some components can produce thousands of pages that are useless but still get indexed by Google. This particular user installed the Events Calendar component and ended up with empty pages indexed until the year 3200. He also ended up with a heavy penalty from Google.

Google is in the process of prioritizing the way it crawls pages. If you have a lot of junk, Googlebots will crawl your site less frequently. The days of when bigger sites were always better sites are gone. Each page only has a certain amount of Page Rank and link authority to spend. You need to spend it wisely on pages that matter. If your excessive content gets out of hand you’ll be hit by a rankings penalty.

The following is an incomplete list of components that can create empty and/or duplicate content:

• Events Calendar
• Amazon Products Feed Bridge
• Almost any component with an RSS feed.

These are not bad components. Use them, but handle with care.

Whats the solution?

Four things you can do to avoid SEO problems with components on your site:

1. Carefully and regualarly monitor the pages you have indexed in Google. Check for any components that have too many pages indexed.
2. Use your robots.txt to stop Google indexing components that might cause trouble. For example, we use the Amazon Products Feed Bridge on many sites. Its useful for visitors, but because Amazon products appear on so many other sites, its useless for visitors. So, I simply open up the robot.txt file and stop Google from indexing the component by adding: Disallow: /option,com_apf_bridge/
3. Check your components carefully when you set them up. If any component produces many pages without any effort on your part, change the settings to minimize those pages, or use robots.txt.
4. Turn off your RSS feeds unless you really believe they’re going to be useful. Don’t have RSS published just because its “Web 2.0” and its cool. If you decided you do need RSS in place, use robots.txt to stop the search engines from indexing the feeds.

A while ago, we talked about how to make MosTree more Search Engine Friendly. Well, we have a Part 2 to that article, this time dealing with the way the word “Root” appears in the directory homepage and the titles for the inside page are simply the name of the category. Looking for something more descriptive and full of keywords?

We have a small hack that may help. This will give you the ability to changes the page titles to something more Search Engine Friendly.

A word of caution – you will need to open the mtree.php and make the edits yourself in three places.

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On line 223 change:

$mainframe->setPageTitle( $_MT_LANG->ROOT );

to:

$mainframe->setPageTitle( ‘Whatever I want my main page title for MosTree to be’? );

On line 226 change:

$mainframe->setPageTitle( $cat->cat_name );

to:

$mainframe->setPageTitle( $cat->cat_name. ‘ whatever I want to come after the category name on the category pages’? );

On line 1455 change:

$mainframe->setPageTitle( $link->link_name );

to:

$mainframe->setPageTitle( $link->link_name . ‘ – whatever I want to come after the listing name on the individual listing pages’? );

If you wanted to, you could also add in default text for the meta keywords and description, under each of these edits. You would need to make changes to these lines:
Lines 229 to 236 (root and category page)
Lines 1457 to 1466 (listings page)

A final word of warning

• please backup the original mtree.php file
• you will probably need to redo these changes when upgrading to future versions.

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Be careful with Virtuemart and your efforts at Search Engine Optimization.

We had an SEO client during January who suffered from an odd problem that has overtaken 2,800 pages according to a Google search. 

It seems that VirtueMart sometimes appends a random set of characters to the end of URLs in other parts of the site. It might be a content page, another component or a static content item, but it can happen to all of them and then end up looking like this:

mydomain.com/contact.html?virtuemart=96380df297565350d754c589f46a4f3a

The problem is easy to miss because the normal URLs work without any problems. The only way to diagnose the issue is to use a search engine to analyze your site.

I don’t believe that this can be attributed to any one particular Search Engine Friendly URL tool because we found examples with each of the following setups:

• No SEF URLs at all
• Default Joomla SEF URLs
• Open-SEF

This issue has been raised on the Virtuemart forums and the best that has been produced so far is a work-around rather than a solution. The poster suggests that if the menu links to Virtuemart iare hardcoded rather than created inside of Joomla, the problem can be avoided. However, because the matter was urgent, we ended up disabling VirtueMart on the client’s site and I haven’t had the chance to test whether this solution really removes the pages from search engine listings.

If you’re running VirtueMart and you’re not sure it you have this problem, go to Google and search for "inurl:"?virtuemart" and your domain name.