Oct
25
2007
| SEO Comparison of Joomla 1.0 and 1.5 |
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| Thursday, 25 October 2007 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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After the big chart earlier this week comparing the Search Engine Friendly URL Components for Joomla, I wanted to take a similar approach and compare the SEO features of Joomla 1.0 and 1.5. What's On the Chart?On the chart is a rundown of all the key on-page SEO factors. We can't help you when it comes to building links or writing articles people want to read, but we can advise on the technical stuff. Who May Find This Useful
Hopefully this chart will help people who:
The Small Print
Joomla 1.0 and 1.5 SEO Features
Comments (9)
  written by Tom, October 26, 2007
This is a great post! The comparison is just what I've been looking for to help me to decide when to make to switch.
One thing I'd like to know more about is the use of sh404SEF to control the page titles and H1 tags. I've read things about it, but it's not clear how it's achieved. Maybe a blog post on this could be on the cards? The page title control is a major downfall of Joomla in my opinion. Thanks, Tom  written by Amy Stephen, October 26, 2007
Have you had a chance to review Charl van Niekerk's xHTML project from SOC 2007? Charl indicated it would be released with v 1.5 stable, but, it's available now to download and review (and to adapt/use now, as many of us are). It directly addresses many of the items on your list. (In fact, it goes well beyond these traditional SEO areas and advances into Microformats, a topic I expect to hear a lot of you SEO experts to blog about during 2008.)
We are going to need to continue to work together to advance Joomla! v 1.5. It's our future. Steve - your analysis continues to be an important part of that and I appreciate your contributions to our community. Thanks! Amy   written by Steve Burge, October 26, 2007
Hi Zorro
Thats a great post - I just read it via Google translator. Do you mind if we translate it and post it here? Hi Tom The short answer to that is that you need to publish the extra module that auto-installs with sh404SEF. It needs to be in the last module position. So if you check this site: http://www.alledia.com/?tp=1 you'll see that its the "right" module position. Its different on each template so add /?tp=1 to find yours. Hi Amy I've been watching that closely and its good news. The easier it is to share and syndicate the information we produce, thet better it is. We actually do much more SE Marketing (interacting with other sites) than we do SEO: (technical changes). Microformats will only help that.  written by Zorro, October 26, 2007 Thats a great post - I just read it via Google translator. Do you mind if we translate it and post it here? Go ahead Steve ... written by Amy Stephen, October 27, 2007
Steve - just to clarify, Charl's work is for semantic improvements in Joomla! v 1.5 across the board (i.e., standard tagging, improved meta data, removing tables, validating to strict xHTML), in addition to the introduction of Microformats, where appropriate. It will likely be core v 1.6 which will be fantastic news for everyone! It's no wonder they have asked him to join the developer team.
 written by Good Web Practices, October 29, 2007
Excellent post Steve! This answers the questions I have been looking at for the past few months!
 written by compass, November 01, 2007
Interesting analysis, I think there is more under the surface though....
One thing that 1.5 seems to resolve is the problem of appending article keywords/descriptions/title tags to the global ones. On one RC (I forget which), they would correctly replace instead of append, making the interior pages much better, as we would want with a deep pyramid topic schema. Second of course, its a few minutes work to slap a template override on and have all the HX tags replace .contentblahblah automagically. I think a summary would be to say that 1.5 will perform better out of the box, but the "tweaking" potential for 1.0 will remain much greater for a while I would think. Write comment
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The conclusion really deserves to be moved out of the small print: If you care about SEO, and you have a new project now, do it with 1.0.x and use the extensions available to make the SEO improvements you need.
I do have a small addition to one of your points: Duplicate content is not just an issue with PDF and print pages, it also occurs with content items, due to the way Joomla handles the ItemID. That has always been a major problem with the Mambo/Joomla core with regard to SEO, and it goes for Joomla 1.5 as well as 1.0.x. I described this in my recent article about the current state of SEO features in 1.5 RC3. (German language - see if Google can translate it into something understandable for you - I can come up with a translation if needed.)
Kind regards,
Zorro