Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

A few weeks ago we mentioned that there was some good news for those people who have duplicate content on their site. A Google staff member mentioned that there was no longer going to be an active penalty for websites that committed this particular mistake.

Some people were happy. Some were dubious and belived the penalty still existed. Some simply said, "what the beep is duplicate content and how does it affect my Joomla site"?

This post is that for that last group of people.

What is duplicate content?

When a website has several pages, all with substantially the same content.

Why is it disliked by search engines?

Because spammers can use this to make their site appear much bigger than it really is to search engines. If you come across an apparently small site that has 50,000 pages indexed by Google, its a fair bet they are using duplicate content to trick the search engines.

Do you think the penalty still exists?

No, but I believe duplicate content can still cause you a lot of problems and that it should be avoided. Aaron Wall, writer of the web’s most popular SEO book, has recently mentioned that you can increase your search engine ranking, simply by preventing fewer junk pages from being indexed. Duplicate content produces a lot of junk pages and eventually Google’s bots will get tired of visiting your many useless URLs. 

Why is it a problem with Joomla?

Because Joomla has a tendency to produce many different URLs to just one page. We’ll use this page as an example. The following six

URLs can reach this page. Each URL has the same content and the same metadata. Its duplicate content hell:

1. Regular, non Search Engine-Friendly URL
2. Regular, non Search Engine-Friendly URL with a menu Itemid
3. URL to make the page display as a PDF

4. URL to make the page display in print view
5. URL to make the page display in Print view with a menu Itemid

6. URL with Search-Engine-Friendly URL component turned on

Adding more components can produce even more URLs.

How can you stop your Joomla site being penalised?

1. Unpublish your PDF and Print buttons for all articles.
2. Use JPromoter. Analyze your site and then go to "Optimize Your Site". Search by using "Group by Same Titles". Make sure you choose "No index" and "No follow" for all but one copy of each page. This means that Google should only index the pages you want indexed.
3. Start your site right by choosing one SEF URL component and sticking with it as long as you possibly can. Different SEF components often render links in different ways.
4. Instead of simply creating menu links to a component, create a URL link to the SEF URL for that component. For example, instead of having a menu link to "index.php?option=com_login&Itemid=65" you can have a menu link to "login". This makes sure that only the "login" URL is read by search engines.
5. If you’re a spammer …. stop!

I had the pleasure of talking to Phil Braddock, a Melbourne based Joomla developer, over the Christmas holidays.

He runs Salsa Internet and is someone who comes at Joomla from the perspective of someone focused on trying to improve Joomla’s SEO performance. There seems to be an increasing number of us! As the number of people wanting to use Joomla increases, a lot of people are working out how to improve its less SEO-friendly aspects.

One of those is inability to create a unique meta title that might be different from what actually appears on the page. To give an example from Phil’s site, his portfolio page is simple has the words "Portfolio > Websites" on the top of the content item. That makes sense to a reader, but is next to useless if it was also the meta title. Look up to the browser bar however, and you’ll see the page’s actual meta title is: "Joomla Web Design and Client Website Portfolio of our work, Melbourne, Australia". Stuffed with valuable keywords!

How did he do this? In Joomla content items you have the "Title" and the "Title Alias". Often people don’t utilize the alias field, but with a little hacking you can add your super-duper meta title in the "Title Alias" field and still have your nice simple title on the page.

What do you need to do? Follow these five simple instructions:

Continue reading “Using the Alias as the Page Title for Joomla SEO”

Apart from Alledia.com, the most popular site we run is JoomlaYellowPages.com, based on the excellent MosTree directory component from Mosets.com.

The site has only been up and running for 4 months, but it has already got some good search engine rankings, positioned as #8 in Google for "Joomla Developers" and #7 in Google for "Joomla Development".

We started to kick around some ideas to make the site more search engine friendly and decided to apply some simple changes to MosTree. 

Continue reading “Making MosTree More Search-Engine Friendly”

I was online looking for a printer the other today and took to browsing through Hewlett Packard’s search results. After flicking through for a while, something started to feel odd? Wasn’t there a big scandal in the news about HP recently? Where was it? Everything seemed rosy in the Search Engine results.

If you search for "Hewlett Packard" you need to go to page 6 on Google to find even the first mention of the corporate spying scandal that hit the company in 2006. Yahoo is even kinder. You need to go to result #264 before you find the faintest hint of scandal.

Continue reading “Cleaning Dirty Search Engine Footprints”

Some good news today for those of you worried about the search engine rankings of your Joomla sites. According to an inteview with Vanessa Fox from Google, there will be no penalty for having duplicate content (that is: having many URLs pointing to the same page).

Joomla and other CMS systems often produce several duplicate URLs. According to Fox, you can use a Google SiteMap to tell the search engine which URL you do want listed. Otherwise the Google bots will do it for you and pick just one of your multiple URLs. Either way, there won’t be a penalty. 

Watch the interview:

This week has been SEO week here at Alledia, so Friday afternoon must be time for another tip.

This one is deceptively simple and comes courtesy of Veloniue Petros over at http://velonis.gr. Over at the Joomla! forum he posted a deceptively simple solution to Joomlas lack of h2 and h3 headings. Google automatically thinks that it you have text wrapped up in headline tags then it must contain more important clues to your page contents than whatever appears in lowly paragraph tags

Unfortunately, Joomla! comes out-of-the-box with headings that are wrapped up in long ugly code. By changing a few lines in the content component, Veloniue has come up with an easy solution which h1 allows you to present your headlines in h2 or 3 tags. All the better for Search Engine Optimization.

Love it or hate it, DMOZ.org has loomed large of webmasters heads for years now, but it seems likely thats its days are numbered.

By clicking here you can read our article from early this year about the history of the DMOZ and its importance, but technical problems are threatening to render years of credibiliy obsolete in just a month. No new submissions are being accepted and editors can’t login. In fact, they are not even being told what the problems are. A group are publicly venting on this forum thread.

For a centerpiece of the web, DMOZ always seemed arcane and territorial with sites submitted to it system appearing, or not, anywhere from days to years in thh future. That has been a core problem and one that has helped to erode its influence, particularly with allegations of bribery for listings.

However, no major website can be out of service for a month and expect to retain its credibility. AOL is not a particularly healthy company and we have to wonder whether they want to spend time and money fixing it.

Some of you will cheer and celebrate over DMOZ’s coffin. Some will wonder whether the project was doomed from the start. Some think it died months or years. The end result is that SEO is more in your hands and less in those of a faceless editor. That can’t be a bad thing. 

(I must declare a interest: I am (was?) an editor for DMOZ.)

This is one of an ongoing series of blog posts about problems with Joomla and SEO, and more importantly – how to fix them.

As we find time we're going to expand and merge these articles into a longer and more comprehensive guide to Joomla SEO. Watch this space.

• Joomla produces your site name first and then your page title. For example, see this search.

Many Joomla sites will look like this when the ideal situation would be to have everything reversed:  Datso Gallery User Tab Plugin Released. Joomlapolis – the home of Community Builder. That way people could easily read what the page was about and it would rank better in Google.

Solution: JPromoter, or if you don't want to spend the money, keep your site title and page to a maximum of 35 characters.

• Duplicate Content. This is a huge problem. I would definitely recommend:

1. Turning off Print and PDF buttons because Google indexes these as new pages with the same content. Email buttons can stay.
2. Checking all your modules to see whether they cause similar problems. We have found that AJAX Recommend is one module that does this.

We write an article every month for a magazine distributed around Atlanta. December’s article is a brief introduction to more advanced Search Engine Optimization techniques that small businesses can use.

We focus on two of the most useful techniques, building minisites and optimizing your inside pages.

Click here to read the full article.