Install a Search Engine Friendly URLs Component

Joomla's default URLs, like the standard URLs of any CMS, are terrible for Search Engine Optimization purposes. They have several querystring parameters, they are not human readable, they offer search engines no keywords or insight into what content the page holds, and they use the Itemid parameter to create multiple URLs for each content item. Luckily there are Search Engine Friendly URL components available for Joomla that solve all these issues for us. 

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I used to use the JoomSEF component on my Joomla websites. It worked very well to create descriptive, search engine friendly, human readable URLs for my web sites, but it didn't properly remove the Itemid URL parameters. This meant that each article still had several URLs. This was very bad for search engine optimization and for people visiting my sites. Search engines thought I was duplicating content and often indexed the wrong URLs, and visitors would get confused with different URLs pointing to the same article.

I just recently uninstalled JoomSEF and installed sh404SEF here on JoomlaDigger.com. What an improvement! JoomSEF had an excellent feature set, but in my opinion sh404SEF is a much better solution. It has completely removed all Itemids from the web site's URLs, leaving just one URL for every article. It accomplishes this by looking into your main menu to find the best Itemid for each content item, then routes all other links to that article to the new SEF URL using only one Itemid (which is hidden from visitors and only used on the backend).

{cbauthor}There were so many links pointing to JoomlaDigger.com's old URLs that I did have to spend a couple of hours creating Search Engine Friendly 301 redirects from the old URLs to the new ones. Luckily sh404SEF allows you to create URL aliases for every new SEF URL. Each alias you enter is then automatically 301 redirected to the new SEF URL, pointing search engines and visitors coming in on old links to your new articles. This takes a little time to set up, but it is definitely worth it to redirect your PageRank to the new URLs and keep visitors from getting 404 pages.

SEF URLs are a MUST for every Joomla website. I highly recommend downloading sh404SEF and installing it for Joomla 1.0 or Joomla 1.5.

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