Welcome to Alledia - the Joomla SEO Experts

What is the one thing you must do?

Delete all the sample Joomla content. Doing site reviews for the SEO Club, one of the first things I do is a simple site:example.com search in Google to get a feel for the kind of pages a site has indexed. The most common problem I find is that people have dozens of default Joomla pages indexed.

People forget to remove the sample articles and sometimes even the text after the read more. A quick search for some of the "Welcome to Joomla!" text shows over 739,000 people who have forgotten to remove it. Also commonly indexed are newsfeeds and weblinks.

Why is this a problem?

1. Its duplicate content on a large scale
2. Its unrelated to the actual content of your site

Whats the Solution?

Either uncheck "Install Sample Data" when installing manually or:

• Delete these before launch:
  
  
  1. All content and static content pages
  2. All newsfeed categories and items
  3. All weblinks categories and items
  
  
• Unpublish these mambots (otherwise you'll find a lot of clutter in the search results):

1. Search weblinks
2. Search contacts
3. Search newsfeeds
4. Search categories
5. Search sections
   

Comments (6)

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written by trichnosis, January 11, 2008

Hi;

Thanks for the remind an important point for joomla users. most of the people (like me ) can do this big mistake. i have realised my mistake 5 months later after starting my joomla site

Excellent
written by Cory Webb, January 12, 2008

Great tip, Steve! I always uncheck the "Install Sample Data" option in the Joomla! installer. It just creates extra work because you have to go through and delete the extra content.

By the way, welcome back! Great to see you back on the blog.

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written by Steve Burge, January 12, 2008

Hi trichnosis - easy to do isn't it? I've done the same thing myself, particularly if I've been lazy and installed via Fantastico.

Hey Cory - thanks for the kind words and Happy New Year! Hopefully stepping away from the computer for the first time in quite a few months will lead to some better blogging.

Dont forget to change the favicon
written by Brian Teeman, January 12, 2008

No real SEO reason for this but I think a site looks so much more professional with its own favicon

Just don't unpublish search content
written by bernard esterhuyse, January 14, 2008

Pretty obvious, but I almost made the mistake of unpublishing search content. Obviously your search will exclude content, and you don't want this.

PS: Brian, I couldn't aggree more, I add a custom favicon to all my sites. Keeping the default Joomla one aslo makes it obvious that it is a joomla site, adding security risk.

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written by Barrie North, January 14, 2008

Like Cory (happy New Year), I almost always find my self creating a site with no sample content anyway.

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