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Home / Joomla 1.5 / SEO Comparison of Joomla 1.0 and 1.5

Oct

2007

SEO Comparison of Joomla 1.0 and 1.5

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:

are thinking about upgrading to 1.5
want an easy reference chart for SEO improvements in 1.0 or 1.5

The Small Print

The factors are heavily based on SEOMoz's Google Search Engine Ranking Factors because it does a good job of combining the wisdom of many experts.
The list is more-or-less in the order of importance given by the SEOMoz team. Page titles are much important than duplicate content for example.
The Joomla 1.0 codebase has been around for at least 3/4 years, whereas 1.5 is still Release Candidate. Of course it has less available extensions.
Some important on-page SEO factors have been left out, notable keywords in body text, bold print and h2 or h3 titles. This is because they can just be done with any WYSIWYG editor.
I'm sure that plugins will emerge to cover all the current holes in 1.5. Give it time. However, if SEO is really important to you and thinking that you should wait before using 1.5 ... you're right.

Joomla 1.0 and 1.5 SEO Features

	Part of 1.0 Core? [-]	1.0 Extensions to Provide / Improve This Feature [-]	Part of 1.5 Core? [-]	1.5 Extensions to Provide / Improve This Feature [-]
Keyword Use in Title Tag	Yes, but with very little flexibility	Use the Joomlatwork.com SEF Patch or or sh404SEF, Artio SEF, SEF Advance, SerrBizSEF, JPromoter for unique page titles	Yes, but with very little flexibility.	Use "Alias for PageTitle Plugin"
Relationship of Body Text Content to Keywords		JooFox Content Analyzer will calculate your keyword density		Not Yet
Keyword Use in H1 Tag		JoomSEO or sh404SEF		Not Yet
Keyword Use in Page URL		sh404SEF, Artio SEF, SEF Advance, SerrBizSEF, JPromoter	Much better core URLs	Not Yet
Keyword Use in Alt Tags and Image Titles	Any good WYSIWYG Editor. Be sure to set alt tags manually	Any good WYSIWYG Editor. Be sure to set alt tags manually	Any good WYSIWYG Editor. Be sure to set alt tags manually	Any good WYSIWYG Editor. Be sure to set alt tags manually
Keyword Use in Meta Description Tag	Yes, but only for core content items	SEF Patch or sh404SEF, Artio SEF, SEF Advance, SerrBizSEF, JPromoter	Yes, but only for core content itemss	Not Yet
Keyword Use in Meta Keywords Tag	Yes, but only for core content items	SEF Patch or sh404SEF, Artio SEF, SEF Advance, SerrBizSEF, JPromoter	Yes, but only for core content items	Not Yet
Avoids Duplicate Content	non-SEF URLs and Print / PDF buttons can cause duplicate content havoc	Turn off PDF and Print pages	Has SEF URLs and "no-follow" on key links	Not Yet
Avoids Duplicate Title/Meta Tags on Many Pages	Site Title and Global Configuration metadata appear on every page	SEF Patch or sh404SEF, Artio SEF, SEF Advance, SerrBizSEF, JPromoter	Site Title and Global Configuration metadata appear on every page	Not Yet
Google Sitemap		Joomap, SEF Service Map		XMap

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Your Comments (18)

Klaus Nitsche

October 26, 2007

Right on Steve! This is an excellent comparison that tells it all.

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

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

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

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.

Klaus Nitsche

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 ...

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.

David Towers

October 29, 2007

Excellent post Steve! This answers the questions I have been looking at for the past few months!

Barrie North

November 02, 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.

Zulu Boandami

March 23, 2008

You should really update this post. It would be great.

Technology Addict

May 30, 2008

Hello everybody, and thanks for the well written article and for the comparision charts.

I agree with Zorro: 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 have a travel website builded on 1.0 with extensions Benidorm Hotels that had no problem with the urls and met all my SEO needs. In exchange, now I'm building a new site, on Joomla 1.5 and I experienced a hard to solve problem. Titles work fine for the static content, but for the menus that show information in a blog style from a category I get duplicate titles... I could not fix this with the alias plugin.

Avago

June 26, 2008

I can say Joomla 1.5 is now a little bit better with sh404 in combination with the SEFPatch from Joomlaatwork. But always a little bit risk with every update.

Raymond Chan

July 22, 2008

It is great! I like comparison table

Space Zone

July 23, 2008

gr8 seo comparison but I wonder if there is a meaning for a title tag in seo
I don't see many article talk about it
even u 4get to talk about it

Peter S

July 24, 2008

Thanks for this great article. I am interested what is with Joomla 1.6 and the seo-settings in the wishlist. i hope that the important things will be integrated.

Bingo - Rob

October 01, 2008

I am still using 1.0 because of this reason, but the main drawback with joomla, plus in version 1.5 is the code structure. I see more themes coming out now placing the main content at the top of the page using CSS, but this should have been worked into the core code, or at least thought about.

Haroon

November 01, 2008

Hi,

Great info. One question though, since this article was written in October 2007, how have things changed now?

I am in middle of migrating one of my websites to 1.5 and this has put me off, would love to see an update.

Thank you.

Sandrof

January 08, 2009

Hi,

This comparison is very helpful, but a little out of date in the meantime.
Are there significant changes now?
I am new to Joomla and wanted to know wich version i should use...

Thanks for your great articles.

Best Regards
Sandro