Joomla SEO - Search Engine Optimization

A few weeks ago I didn’t know what to think of Nooku… I heard of it, read the Blog posts at Joomlatools.org but still saw it as a new Joomfish component.

But then I got to the eduvision Joomla conferentie were Johan Janssens and Mathias Verraes did a presentation on their new Joomla Content translation component Nooku.
Although Johan warned us about the fact that "Live demonstrations have a tendency to go wrong" theirs run without any noticeable problems.

For you who havent heard about Nooku yet a short introduction.
Nooku is a Joomla component that helps you to build a multi language Joomla websites and does that in a way that it is really simpel for translators to do their work.
You can even track how they do their work, see how far your translations are and how long they worked on their translations.
Well, You have to pay them, so you want to check that what they charge your for is what you are got…. with Nooku you can!

Hold on, I can here you think, what about the language specific URLs? Strange formed URLs, Not translated Titles, not translated Meta-tags like descriptions, keywords etc etc…

An Impressive Component

Now this is where Johan and Mathias really impressed me!
They showed in a live demo how Nooku not only showed the percentage of a page translation that was done on the standard language, but they showed allot more….

The title that was translated was indeed translated also in the HTML Title, but also the URL itself was automatically rewritten to that language title version.
You also get the possibility to translate your meta tag description and keywords into the translated version… so you really get a translated version of a content page in a SEO Friendly (might I say a real Search Engine Optimized way).

There is more.. look at these (real life) URLs
http://html.knowyourrights2008.org/en/childrens-corner.html
http://html.knowyourrights2008.org/nl/kinderhoek.html
http://html.knowyourrights2008.org/es/el-rincon-de-los-ninos.html

Can you believe they did that for  Eight (8) different languages… with Nooku version 0.5… what do they have in store for use when they hit version 1.0?

Multi-language and Search Engine Optimization

Lets look at some other things Nooku does when it comes to SEO, the first thing you say was the URL rewrites.
That wasn’t done by a component like sh404SEF or any other component, that was done by Nooku…

Speed is also a concern when it comes to Multi language Joomla sites, they can be really slooowww. Nooku (according to the tests they ran) even speeded up the Joomla 1.5 website on which it run because Nooku brings in its own Caching system.

 Last but not least is the content translation handling (you do know SEO it all about content for your users, right?).
Once the standard page is written (you can choose your own language standard) you don’t have to go into some strange component cpanel, you just select the language you want to translate to from a small selection box in the right hand corner of your content menu and you can start your translation!
Thats right, you don’t even need to leave your content editor screen… now wouldn’t you want that for your multi language Joomla based website?

How to get it!

From an SEO point of view I even would like it for my single language Joomla website…it has a lot of my wishes right in one component…
So why don’t I have it… because it is not on the free market yet…sigh….

At this moment it is only available for partners of Joomlatools.org but that has its advantage in requesting features, getting support and more.
I ams just a singly person writing about Joomla, SEO and building just a few sites a year, so the partnership price is not an option for me.
If I was a full time Joomla website builder with some clients that needed Multi-languages websites, then I would be the next to sign-up! The partnership price is not that high that it is unaffordable, it is just for me not an option.

Like I said: If you run a Joomla website building company and have customers that need multi-language Joomla websites you owe it to yourself to get in contact with the Nooku team and partner-up…

And No, I don’t get paid for this post, and don’t have stocks in Nooku or Joomlatools and yes, I really, really like this component…

Here is video from there website that explains even more about Nooku and how it works.

P.s. Reminder to myself, send Mathias the example of the HTML Title feature we talked about that is one part of the Joomlatwork patch. 

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In the last few days, the Joomla SEO and Bloggers community have been writing a lot about two posts on the Official Webmaster Blog.
Two posts, one about Demystifying the "duplicate content penalty" and the other on Dynamic URLs vs. static URLs.

From a Joomla webmaster point of view, these items look as if they would turn the world of Joomla SEO upside down…
Yes, Joomla can produce multiple URLs that pint to just one content item and Yes, Joomla is a Content Management System and thus will produce Dynamic URLs.
So it seems only natural that Joomla webmasters and Joomla SEO Specialists will read and react on these posts.

Duplicate Content Issues

So lets see what people are writing, first is Arno Zijlstra on his Joomla Blog , he wrote a short post pointing to the first Google webmasters Blog and About how Google thinks about Joomla! and duplicate content which is followed by some fine comments by Steve from Alledia and I really like the comment of Johan Janssens "Finally ! Been fighting this fight for 3 years now …".

Which is really true and people think multiple URLs to one article is a bad thing from Joomla!, but also WordPress and Drupal will do the same.

But as Adam Lasnik already wrote in 2006 Deftly dealing with duplicate content Google does a good job on filtering the best link to an article itself. (That article has some tips on how to improve things from a search engine point of view)
Vanessa Fox did a kind of follow up on that post also on Duplicate Content also giving pointers to help your site to get better SERP results.

Duplicate content is not the same as having different URLs pointing to the same article, most certainly not if the links are on the same domain! Duplicate content is if you publish your articles on more domains, or use the same text on multiple pages on your site.
See the difference? Multiple pages, not multiple URLs.

Steve did a piece on Joomla and Duplicate Content also in 2007 and I did write some articles about it on my other Blog like Simple things to avoid duplicate content , but the best post was this one on The Duplicate Content Penalty Myth (That Title was close to the Google’s blog….back in 2007)
Quote "I’m here to tell you that there is no such thing as a search engine penalty for duplicate content. At least not the way many people believe there is. " … now where did I read something similar…?

Also Barrie North wrote a piece about this Joomla duplicate content issue, also pointing to different URLs and the problem about diluting pagerank between those URLs.
Which brings us back to the second posts from Google’s webmaster Blog.

Dynamic URLs vs. static URLs

Joomla in standard installation has URLs filled with parameters, Google is now saying that you can just leave them as it is…or not?
Well no, they are telling you that if you want to do rewrites of your URLs to do it the right way, which means make sure that you have one URL pointing to your article.
O, and just to point out one thing… did anyone notice that the Google webmaster Blog itself rewrites their URL to a Keyword rich one?
Or should I assume that they write there pages in a pure static HTML version?

Looking at this post and some of the examples given, it seems that there are some Cms systems out there that really stuff there URLs with a lot of parameters and adding parameters each time new content is added.
But that is not the case with Joomla, Joomla sites with the basic URLs can get good results in the SERPs but in my opinion and based on my experience that once that are using URLs rewrites are doing even better.

As confusing these two posts can be, they also have some great information on how Google robots and indexing is done.
And no, Google is not the only search engine robot out getting your links, Yahoo and Live can also bring in some traffic.
More importantly, people tend to click on better looking URLs more often because they recognize the topic keywords.

So what to do with your Joomla! site?

For me this is simple, if you already have good rankings, keep doing what you do the way you are doing it now.
Changing URLs now based on the Dynamic URLs vs Static URLs post will surely drop your results.

If you are setting up a new Joomla site make sure you use a SEF Component like sh404SEF that will point all duplicate URLs to just one URL and will send a proper 301 redirect from the standard Joomla URL to the SEF one.
One other point why you should use sh404SEF is that it will give Google a real 404 code on a 404 page and thus cleaning up duplicate URLs over time.

I addition to the sh404SEF component, make sure that you have a Google / Yahoo / Live, oké , oké a sitemap.org complaint sitemap.xml file (ore equivalent) that holds the URLs produced by the SEF component.
That way the search engines will know what URL you think is the best if they find duplicate URLs.
Don’t forget to set that path in your robots.txt.

Conclusion 

Read the Google webmaster posts and read them carefully, also read some of the comments.
They indeed can be very confusing and send you in the wrong direction as some other Google information looks like it is contradicting to what is written.
Maybe they should follow a short course from Brain Clark on how to write clearly on a technical subject.

Am I changing my advice on SEO on Joomla and WordPress? No! I have seen sites go from page 150 to page 1 on their targeted keywords just by rewriting their URLs.
But if you want to give it a try, just shut down your SEF options, wait for a few weeks and see what happens.
Then please come back here and put your experience in the comments, I would love to read about them then I always look forward to reading about a nice experiment.

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Yet another great post from Smashing Magazine, this time Glen Stansberry wrote post reviewing of 10 Weblog Engines among them WordPress, Drupal and Joomla!

Af course they included MovableType and ExpressionEngine which I also tried but didn’t like that much.

Looking and writing about the following aspects of each engine:

• Programming language.
• What features you’ll need.
• The size of the software’s community.
• The age of the software.
• If you are planning on extending the Blog.

For Programming language my favorite is PHP, Like WordPress, Drupal and Joomla! (and Typo3)
Features are within the core or easily integrated with Extensions like Components,  Plugins and/or Modules.
Both these Blogging platforms have very good community to support you, although Joomla! is the biggest at this moment.
Age for me is really not much of an issue but for you looking at the first release dates…
WordPress started in 2003, Drupal in 2001 and Joomla! in 2005 as a fork from Mambo that was build from 2000 (Open source Dual license in 2001)
Extending your "Blog" is really easy with all the packages I favor.

Focus on Blogging

But when it comes to Blogging, WordPress works best for me and in the Smashing magazine post Glen wrote one simple statement under Drupal and extend it later on to Joomla!
        "it’s not just blogging software. Drupal is community software. "
Which is exactly how I see it…
You can use Joomla! for Blogging and with Drupal you can do the same thing, but I just don’t like the Drupal control panel that much to write blogposts.

One other great article comparing Drupal and Joomla  mentioned in the post is from Steve (Hope you get a lot of traffic from this Smashing magazine article!)  over at Alledia on Joomla and Drupal.(Needs an Update since the release of Joomla 1,5 ;-)

All in all, a nice overview of the Blogging Engine landscape of today from Smashing Magazines, and for me its good to see that Joomla now is also considered a Blogging Platform although still with some limitations.
But those limitations can be overcome with the right setting and Blogging Components for Joomla.

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Joomla just released version 1.5.6. of its Open Source CMS.
This release is an security fix that fixes a leak that "will allow an unauthenticated, unauthorized user to reset the password of the first enabled user (lowest id)".

So if you run a Joomla 1.5.x website, make sure you update soon! asap would be fine :-)

For the rest, you can read that even a seasoned Joomla administrator sometimes forget to put a basic security practice in place.

Here are some tips to make your Joomla site just a little safer:
- create some new users after installation and give one of them super-administrative rights, make sure you know the user-name and password to login.
Then Login under this user-name and delete the first user called Admin.

- Set your configuration.php file permissions to 644, or even 604 to prevent php injections and overwriting your configuration.php. Do the same with your index.php file.

- Make sure your administration directory is secured by .htaccess and password, the easiest way you can realize this is mostly done by the cpanel of your hosting company.
Otherwise there is a good tutorial on Joomla Add-ons

- Make a proper backup of your website after your last changes or at least on a weekly base.
Also have a copy of your configuration.php and index.php files on your local PC.

From an SEO point of view a hacked website can get you into trouble because Google will take you out of the Index (may take some days, depending on your crawl frequency) and you have to do a re-inclusion request once the site is backup again.

If you want to keep an eye on your website, use a program like http://mon.itor.us/ or the one I use Site24×7, both can send you an warning email if something goes wrong.
And both will give you the possibility of a free account and don’t overcharge for their service. 

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