I received a review copy of Joomla! 1.5 Multimedia from Packt Publishers and was expecting to read a lot that I already know about Images and the image manager in Joomla!.

But instead it was an eye-opener about the possibilities that Joomla! and some special extensions gives you to create a complete multimedia experience for your visitors.

This book is a great addition to your search engine optimisation efforts as we all now that video, mp3, podcast en mobile web interfaces are becoming more important everyday.

Joomla! 1.5 Multimedia will have some information for you that you can skip through if you are building Joomla! websites for a longer period of time, but the main part of the book will help you to further improve your and your customers websites.

Joomla! 1.5 Multimedia by Allan Walker

I am not going the repeat the complete list of chapters of this book, you can follow the link above to get a better content listing than I can do… what I will tell you which chapters captured my special interest:

• Chapter 3: Text, Characters and Fonts: This shows you some good information on how to improve accessibility and still play with fonts in your design.
• Chapter 5: Using Audio: How to setup podcasts and the handling of mp3s which is very good in combination with normal blogging.
• Chapter 6: Using video: Of course information about Video including a few extensions that will aid you in your efforts to use video in Joomla!
• Chapter 7: Collaboration with external resources: You don’t need to produce all the videos yourself, you can also pull from other resources and this chapter shows some very neat information about how to do that the right way.

Chapter 8 about templates is also good, but for me personally not that interesting, Chapter 9 gives you a complete step-by-step overview of the building of a Multi Media Joomla! based website and can be a great help if you start out to implement the other ideas that come from this well written book.

Don’t take my word on it, check out this sample Chapter 4 from the book: Adding and Managing Image Content.

For my, this book will stay on my desk for a longer period of time as I am going to use a lot of information from it :-), thank you Allen Walker and Packt Publishing for this great new book.

Tags

Joomla, Joomla Seo

You are reading Joomla 1.5 Multimedia by Allan Walker – A Book to Consider! an article from Joomla , WordPress & SEO by Herbert-Jan van Dinther

In the last few months I have been moving some websites from subdomains to new domains and sometimes changing there apperance.
Here is what happened on one of them…

The site was number One on Google for a long tail keywords phrase and it site was getting some nice traffic from this term.

After the move from its sub-domain life and going into its own domain I changed the template to a more suitable one and optimized the site to get more traffic.

One thing I did was the craft the Home page title so it would get even more traffic and it worked out nicely. The new theme was search engine optimized and I did not feel like I needed to do anything about it…

As I said, the site had a No. 1 position on Google, but after I wrote a new post on this site this happened to the traffic.

Once I noticed the drop in traffic I checked Google and saw the site was still No. 1 but not with the title of the homepage anymore.

The title shown by Google was the title of the last post and no longer this traffic attracting title of the Homepage!
This title was not really on topic of the search term so nobody clicked on it to check out the site!

I checked the theme and changed the header option to make sure I got the Homepage title back into place.

Bringing it Back on Track

So everything is technically set back to how it should be, and now it was time to get Google’s spider to re-index the site so the homepage title was back where it belonged.

Writing a new post that to update the site did the trick and the site was back in a few days.

All looked good, but a day later there was again this drop in traffic. Now I can explain the first drop, then the recovery but not the second drop.

The only thing I can think of was the short time upgrade followed by something Google might do like switching back for some time serving search engine cached indexes if they upgrade the primary index.
If you have another explanation, I would love to here it!

After this initial drop and kick back the site is now doing well, thank you for asking.
It is still growing in traffic.

Conclusion: Keep track of your site after you do a mayor upgrade like changing themes or even system upgrades.
The thing you need to watch closely is that the so carefully crafted title of you homepage is still the same so it will keep getting you the traffic. Especially it you have the No. 1 position on Google that you wanted to get.

Tags

SEO, WordPress

You are reading No. 1 on Google and No Clicks an article from Joomla , WordPress & SEO by Herbert-Jan van Dinther

2UWW66MMTFPZ?

Yes, a strange string of text in this post, but that is all part of the Blog claim of this new site to get it into Technorati.

The claim is on its way, but as they state on my profile page, it may take quite some time to get it done…

Tags

Blogging

You are reading Technorati claim an article from Joomla , WordPress & SEO by Herbert-Jan van Dinther

As I mentioned on Twitter before, the next step in my 2010 cleanup was Hummerbie, the moving of the Blog that is, not the site Hummerbie.com.

If you are reading this post via your RSS Feed reader or your Feed Mail subscription the Joomla SEO Blog is now on HerbertvanDinther.com, yes on its own domain and no longer in a subdomain of a Joomla! based website.

It has served its purpose in getting traffic for its Big Brother, and now its time to set it free on its own to see if it can grow further into a mayor force on its own.

There was af course an other reason for giving this blog its new domain: Branding… I have been blogging on several sites and platforms under the name Hummerbie and now the Blog lives under Herbert van Dinther and the posts are also posted with the name Herbert-Jan van Dinther.

There is also a domain herbertjanvandinther.com and that is setup with Joomla as Content Management System, but that is my next project to get some content and articles on.

Joomla, WordPress and SEO

For those who have been reading this blog for a longer period of time know that the focus was on Joomla! and SEO, well there is going to be an extra topic on this site and that is going to be WordPress. The system this blog is build on.

I think they can work together to give you the best of both worlds and a feed of this site will be part of the Joomla! site.

One great thing I recently came aware off is that http://www.rockettheme.com/ now is offering Joomla and WordPress themes and if that is not enough, they have this fast Joomla! Theme called Afterburner and the same theme for WordPress Afterburner and they are both Free. So you can have your Joomla! site and WordPress Blog with the same look and feel.

Redevolution has been doing the same thing for a longer period of time now. They also have a great SEO Blog that is worth visiting.

So you see, Joomla and WordPress match up just fine and I have been promoting Joomla on several wordpress.com based blogs like seo4joomla.wordpress.com and joomlablogging.wordpress.com.

As I said before, I needed a new focus for 2010 to get more done and to blog more about the topics I love to write about and I think this move will give me new and fresh idea’s to write about. I do have some things in mind to share with you, so lets make this a great year for all of us.

P.s. If you find any problems on this site after its move, please contact me so I can fix it :-)

Tags

Blogging, Joomla, SEO, WordPress

You are reading Moving Hummerbie’s SEO Blog to its new home an article from Joomla , WordPress & SEO by Herbert-Jan van Dinther

For those who have missed my writings, this is why you did not see much blogging going on here over the last 10 months…

As it is just released Packt is promoting the Book with a special discount that will expire on the 24th of Oct 2009.

So get your copy NOW with the special discount at http://www.packtpub.com/article/exclusive-discount-offer-joomla-seo before it expires.

And I promise I will start blogging about SEO again on a regular base :-)

Need more info on what you can find in my book, check out http://www.packtpub.com/joomla-1-5-search-engine-optimization-seo/book

I hope you will enjoy reading it as much as I did writing it.

P.s. A big Thank YOU to all the people at Packt Publishing that have worked with my on the creation of this book!

Tags

Joomla, Joomla Seo, SEO

You are reading It’s Done… The Joomla 1.5 SEO Book is out Now! an article from Joomla , WordPress & SEO by Herbert-Jan van Dinther

Yes, that is right, they all fail at Search Engine Optimization…

I have been reading several new posts about how well WordPress is doing SEO compared to Joomla! and how good Drupal is in SEO compared to WordPress and….well, you get the general idea.

it seems that every time people are defending their choice to use a certian Content management system. Which is a good thing, you can show people the reasons why you love the system(s) that you use.

We all do, we all like the system of our choice, whether it is WordPress, Joomla!, Drupal, Modx, Typo3, etc,etc. They are all great open source content management systems.

The Big Three, WordPress, Joomla! and Drupal.

I have written before how Search Engine Friendly WordPress, Joomla! and Drupal can be, but they don’t do SEO…, YOU do SEO…

That is right, they don’t do anything else then giving you the tools to get your website ready for higher rankings and better performance in the search engines!

You are the deciding factor in how well search engine optimization is done. You and the webmaster and content writers of your website.

None of the content management systems will come up to you and say, here is a great keyword rich title for your post. None of them will provide you with the keyword rich quality content that attracts visitors and back-links.

That is all up to you.

None of these content management systems will give you the right structure and internal linking ideas for the content of your site based on relevant keywords and none of them will do that keyword research for you.

They are just what they say the are, content management systems. You can use them for building websites, for building blogs, for building community’s, but they still remain content management systems.

They are the engines that drive your website and/or Blog, but you have to work with them to get a really search engine optimized website.

The deciding factor for great search engine optimization

It is up to you to get the most out of the system of your choice and you will see that you can do it!

Either with WordPress, Joomla! or Drupal, or any other system, you have the knowledge and the ideas to get better rankings for you site.

You know your system of choice and you are the engineer that knows how to fire up that engine to drive it up to the best possible spot in the search engine results pages!

So don’t blame or praise a website building engine for getting search engine optimization done right, praise yourself for doing a job well done.

Tags

Drupal, Joomla, SEO, WordPress

You are reading Why Joomla, WordPress and Drupal all Fail at Search Engine Optimization an article from Joomla , WordPress & SEO by Herbert-Jan van Dinther

Above is a little picture I wanted to show you.

For those among you who are used to looking at website traffic graphics you see that something strange has happened here…

You see, the picture above is from one of my websites and shows clearly what the impact was of the following story.

I made a mistake, a simple one but with large consequences as you can see.
Because of this mistake traffic for this site almost went done to zero.
But if it had gone down to zero it would have been clear what happed right from the start, but it did not, I “just” lost traffic from the mayor three search engines.

What happened?

In simple terms: the site was hacked via  a remote inclusion attack from several forum like websites, one of them was successful.
There was just one file affected but one of the most important ones, the .htaccess file.
There were four lines of code injected at the bottom to the file:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} (Googlebot|Slurp|msnbot)
RewriteRule ^ http://example.com/ [R=301,L]three - code used

The code in line three redirects those search engine robots too the site in line four (which I changed, the real site got enough traffic from me).

How was this possible? Simple, because I forgot to reset the security on .htaccess after doing some previous test.
The file was still set to 707 = also public write access, and yes its security is set back to the right access now.

How to find out your site is hacked

As I said before if the traffic had gone to zero you most probably would have checked your site and see a defacing of the site itself of some kind. The site would not work the way you would expect it to.

In this case the only problem I could see was that the traffic dropped hard in the statistics.
Upon looking further into the details I checked the ranking of previous Google search terms the site was ranking for.

I found that all the top 10 ranking pages ware gone! All my efforts to rank for those keywords were lost.

So I logged into Google webmaster to check if there was something horribly wrong with the site and the site had received some kind of penalty.

And yes there were errors with the URLs in the sitemap.xml, errors about unreachable URLs.
So I checked the files on the site that where modified just before the drop, and there was the .htaccess file with the above mentioned code.

Getting back into Google

After cleaning up the mess and setting the security right I realized the impact of these few lines.

All three search engine robots had gotten notice that the pages where permanently moved to another domain! which is not true, but they don’t know that.

Checks on site: reference in Google, Yahoo and MSN showed that the domain was still in Yahoo and MSN Indexes, but had no entry in the Google Index anymore.

So it was time to send a reconsideration request to Google telling them what happened, what had been done to resolve the problem and what steps where taken too prevent it from happening again.

After that, you can only wait and wait…, don’t expect an email form Google, just an automatically generated message in your Webmaster control center that they will look into the matter.

After a few days traffic started to build again from Google and Yahoo as well as MSN (Live.com) so you can conclude that Google really looks and acts upon your requests.

Hard Lessons learned

Now for the fun part of this episode, the lessons learned
First lesson: make sure to secure your cms installation and critical files.

Some tips:
- change passwords on a regular basis (use keepass if you have a lot off passwords to remember)
- secure your admin directory or files with .htaccess passwords, most of the hosting companies have this option in their cpanel
- update your system as soon as a new version comes out.

Check your stats once a day, or a least every few days for strange things happening, since this could have taken me a long time to get back if it wasn’t for those early warning signs.

As a personal note: I need to get more incoming links from non-search engines to diversify my traffic sources :-)

What I realized after my traffic was back to its old level was that Google is really fast in acting on 301 redirects and changes in their index.
They update their index with a higher frequency than Yahoo and Live, and they really act fast on those re-inclusion request as well.

A hack like this before your start your SEO work for organic ranking would also mean that all your efforts will have no effect… so if a cusomers is really having trouble to get his or.her site into the search engines, check the .htaccess file!

If you have your own horror stories like this one, please share them in the comments and let us learn from those stories as well.

Tags

Optimization, SEO, Search Engines

You are reading Lost and Regained Traffic from Google, Yahoo and MSN the Easy Way an article from Joomla , WordPress & SEO by Herbert-Jan van Dinther

If you are running your feeds through Feedburner, you should know that Google bought that service in 2007.
Now they are making the next step, moving the feeds from Feedburner.com to feeds.google.com.

And you have to follow… and you should do it before the end of February 2009.
How? well there is nice instruction written by Michel Martin from Pro Blog Design on How to Move from Feedburner to Google

I just moved my Feeds over to my Google account and it is really easy and you cannot !! go back!

The analytics are nice, although I cannot click on the time line anymore to go to the statistics of my readers, you now have to use a drop-down menu to choose that date.
But you can see the mail addresses of the people who subscribed via the Feedburner email option.

So that  is nice, there are however also a few drawbacks…

Even with the Smart-feed options active, you now just get a limited number of options if you want to subscribe to my feed:

So it seems Google is now cashing in on the Feedburner service and using it to promote their own services and adverts.

Why the move from Feedburner to Google feeds?

Here are some ideas that are on my mind that might be the reasons for Google to force this move upon us Feedburner users:

• Getting the feed data into the central Google index would mean easier and faster integration into the search results pages (well that would be nice:-))
• Monetizing the feeds by adding an easy way to integrate adsense adverts (lets see if that works?)
• Getting more grip on spammers that use a lot of feeds via Feedburner to spam the search index
• Promoting their own feed reader instead of giving people the choice of their favorite feed reader service
• Promoting the use of Google personal page to integrate feeds instead of offering the option to using services like Netvibes
• Taking away the second email subscription option and instead driving people to wards Google mail.

All these reasons will have a large impact on some of the services and companies that where integrated or build on the Feedburner service… 

Can you think of any other evil and non-evil reasons, please post them in the comments.
I would love to read your ideas on the reasons for this move.

Tags

Blogging, Search Engine

You are reading Moving from Feedburner to Google Feeds and Why? an article from Joomla , WordPress & SEO by Herbert-Jan van Dinther

In the last week of this year Joomla announced that the Joomla Extensions Directory (JED) is going to be Only Joomla 1.5 GPL licensed Extensions as of July 1st 2009, and more importantly also all Joomla 1.0 extensions will be unpublished on the Juni 30th 2009.

After the Only GPL Listing announcement, there are heated debates on this decision on Joomla Forums and Blogs like for instance by Barrie North from Compassdesign and Steve Burge from Alledia, both stating there mind about where Joomla should go from here and how to evolve.

Af course this discussion is once again largely about the GPL License on which I am not an expert :-)
More interesting to me are the effects for Developers and users of the JED since Commercial and Encrypted Extensions will no longer be allowed into the Directory.

I want to point you to some nice discussions on the same GPL and Commercial extensions on some other Open Source Content Management Systems, just to show you that the debate is not that new:

• Drupal Forum post: Commercial version Question regarding GPL (Post form 2005!)
• Wordpress Forum: Best practice for Commercial Plugins
• Typo3 Licenses:  Licenses (You have to sign an agreement to prevent legal issues on the Copyright of the Code)

Reading those articles you will find one common idea on all of them, mainly that if you want to be listed, your extensions have to be GPL.
So it seems that Joomla is just catching up to the main stream now…well they are not that old so that, as one pointed out in the forum " these are just growing pains".

The Search Engine Optimization point of view

Well, it is not only SEO, but also a conversion issue (which in light of my previous post should be considered SEO!)

If you read the post on the WordPress forum the comment by Magic Toolbox is very clear and I quote "Without a listing in the directory, we’ve found it hard to promote the tool".

And this is actually the main reason for many Joomla Developers (not all) to react on the decision to ban commercial and encrypted extensions, they heavily rely on the JED to bring them their customers.
So for many their livelihood and business is at stake here and now they have to change their business model to sell support or build membership sites, which is completely different than what they are used to.

In the WordPress community there is one big example at the moment that has turned their business model around from selling themes to selling support and publishing their themes under GPL terms.
That means people like Brain Gardner and Jason Schuller and the rest of the Revolutiontwo team

Also the conversion of the old WordPress theme site and the more recent cleaning action of the WordPress Themes site to remove any non GPL and Themes with "sponsored" links  (well actually buying links from theme developers to get more incoming links) has brought in a lot of comments.
If you look at the WordPress theme site (PR7) you will find at the bottom a link "Commercially Supported Themes", guess to what site that is going :-) 

The Joomla Extension Directory currently has a PR8 ! which gives it a lot of power and possible page rank improvement for your website if you are in that directory!

Removal of the link will drop your ranking and visitors substantially. Some may have experienced this in the last months already as the JED team not only moved to a Joomla 1.5 based site, but also moved extensions into different categories.
The later actions was not that well noticed by most people, but did improve the usability of the directory itself.

So where to go for Joomla Developers? I really can’t say, some will change there business model, others will try to hold there traffic an sales by using more PPC campaigns.  
And some will need to improve their websites with some basic SEO Skills

What I do know is that Joomla 1.0.x website owners will be lost in finding extensions for their websites, so they either need to move to Joomla 1.5 (which is not an easy job) or not extend their sites anymore.

However there will probably will be a commercial site that will provide refuge for Joomla 1.0.x extensions as there is a very large installed based of Joomla 1.0.x sites that are not willing to move to 1.5

Looks like it is going to be a interesting year for Joomla! and the 4170 listed extensions that are currently on the Joomla Extensions site!

But to all of you, have a Happy New Year!

Tags

Joomla

You are reading The new Joomla Extensions Directory JED Policy and SEO effects an article from Joomla , WordPress & SEO by Herbert-Jan van Dinther

If you keep an eye on things that are happening on Google, you will find some interesting things going on at this moment.

Ranking and Google Changes

First I want to point you to two video’s from webpronews.com, the first one is an interview with Bruce Clay about this presentation Ranking is Dead where is looks at how Universal search is going to effect your Search Engine Page results.

The other one is at the same site, but now an interview with Matt Cutts on some of the Changes at Google were he talks about some of the things that Bruce Clay pointed out.

From both interviews you can see that Universal Search is going to target your search result pages based on previous searches and Local Search results based on IP address.
The latter is af course already in place where Google will use IP country ranges to lead you to other Data Centers and gives local and country language specific results.

Universal search is mostly referred to as showing results based on your previous searches , but this time even if you are not logged into your Google mail account!
That might scare some privacy concerned people… take into account that Google, Live and Yahoo already have a lot of information on your search history, be it via cookies, or via your DSL Provider that gives you a nice IP address.
That IP address wil stay the same for a loooong time,which is great! For Search Engines that is…

Actually listening to Bruce Clay I find a lot of things he is predicting for 2009 are already in place, it is just the flick of a switch for Google to turn them on.

Searchwiki

One other new thing you might have seen if you are logged into your Google account and you do searches is the new Searchwiki function.

Next to each Title in the result-page there are two little icons, one for UP and one for Delete, well the last one is to actually remove that result form your own search page.
So now you can get those old or not relevant results out of your own search results, but how will this effect the total results in the long run?

I can imagine Google using those results of up and delete actions to improve results in general.
If you look at large enough numbers of people "voting" on search results you could clean up the total results and make them even more relevant and up-to-date as they are now.

Afraid of your competition "voting" your site out of the results? Don’t worry, as you heard before ranking is dead anyway.
But in fact I guess Google will have some algorithm in place that will show that people are trying to play the system.

The effects on SEO

Both Bruce and Matt mentioned it in their interview, as smart SEO is looking no longer at Search Page results rankings but at Conversion and is deep into analyzing his server logs.

A smart SEO is already working on Blogs, News, Images and Video to keep up with the new upcoming personalized search results and to provide your visitors with the quality content they are looking for.

But one thing I am really looking forward too is that importance of links to your site is going to be downgraded and real quality content is getting a more prominent place in the results pages.
This time driven by your own visitors that don’t have spam sites but are really liking your content. 

Tags

SEO, Search Engine

You are reading Ranking on Google is going to change in 2009 an article from Joomla , WordPress & SEO by Herbert-Jan van Dinther

If you don’t have an RSS feed subscription on the Google Webmaster Central Blog yest, I strongly advice you te get one…

On there latest post they included an nice basic SEO Starters Guide from Google which you might want to forward to some of your customers.

What better way to educate them then sending them a document produced by the Guys that know Google the best.

Af course it is just a basic SEO Guide, but it shows some fine examples of things you need to get done for better rankings.
I personally like the explanation about why you need to have the best URL possible.

For Joomla webmasters this is still an issue, although Joomla 1.5.x "out of the box" is a lot better then Joomla 1.0.x but still not the way I want them.

P.s. don’t forget to update your Joomla 1.5.x to the new Joomla 1.5.8 version! ?(if you use the SEF Patch from Joomlatwork.com you better wait for the update… looks like that could take some days.

Tags

Joomla Seo, SEO

You are reading Learn SEO from Google’s webmasters an article from Joomla , WordPress & SEO by Herbert-Jan van Dinther

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. 

Tags

Joomla Seo

You are reading Nooku? Nooku! The way to go for Multi-language Joomla sites an article from Joomla , WordPress & SEO by Herbert-Jan van Dinther

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.

Tags

Joomla Seo, SEF, SEO

You are reading Joomla Duplicate Content and Dynamic URLs – Google’s view an article from Joomla , WordPress & SEO by Herbert-Jan van Dinther

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.

Tags

Blogging, Drupal, Joomla, WordPress

You are reading Weblog engines reviewed by Smashing magazine an article from Joomla , WordPress & SEO by Herbert-Jan van Dinther

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. 

Tags

Joomla

You are reading Joomla 1.5.6 Security Fix and Some advice on Protection an article from Joomla , WordPress & SEO by Herbert-Jan van Dinther

My Google Alert on Joomla SEO just brought me this link to an Google Insights Article that also discussed the use of this new tool in conjunction with the previous mentioned report in Open Source CMS Market shares.

What interested me even more was how these figures where on a regional level, so I did some comparisons between Worldwide, USA, UK and the Netherlands.

The outcome did somehow surprise me…

Below the graphics for the Worldwide search, showing clearly the search for Joomla as the biggest one…

Now for the Dutch searchers, Joomla is also looking great with extreem high search levels.

When it comes to the UK, you see that Joomla and WordPress are almost level, with WordPress here as the rising star.

But here is the really BIG surprise, Joomla is loosing big time to WordPress when it comes to the United States.

So where does this big difference come from? Are there more Bloggers in the US?
Is WordPress so much more popular in the US for use as a CMS as well?
Is the installed base of WordPress bigger in the US, and are there more questions on using WordPress?

But that is just one way to look at this tool….

Most interesting are the screens just below the Worldwide search, that will show you the regions that are the biggest searchers on that specific keyword.
Which is great information if you need to target a certain region for your SEO Customer.

Also the results below that field, which gives you related searches, but also Rising searches… which means that this is a tool to use in the future to see what keywords are hot and what you should be writing about!

I like the tool! How about you? can you work with this information or are you skeptical about the numbers shown?

Tags

SEO, Search Engine

You are reading Google Insights use for analysis and upcoming trends an article from Joomla , WordPress & SEO by Herbert-Jan van Dinther

Today I read a Report from Water & Stone, a big name in the Mambo community as one of there Templates is a great looking one with a lot of installations.

The report (which you can download here) brings numbers and conclusions on Market shares of Open Source CMS like Joomla!, Drupal, WordPress and many others like e107,Typo3, Modx, Elgg en more…

In the report there are clearly three Big names in Open Source CMS, not that we did not know who the leaders are, but Rik Shreves does a great job by bringing in the numbers to proof it!

What is strange to me was that Twitter users tend to write more on WordPress and Drupal than on Joomla!, Where are the Joomla Twitters?

I also like the Search Engine Ranking research on page 17, on which Joomla! and Drupal score big time, but WordPress is nowhere in sight for the search terms that contain CMS.
Clearly WordPress is still mostly seen as an Blogging platform instead of a Content Management System like Joomla and Drupal.

In the conclusion pages of the report there is also a section about the future of some projects like Mambo en CMSMadeSimple as well upcoming systems like Elgg and Modx.

Get the download and read the report, it is well written with lots of graphs and gives an insight of what the market in Open Source CMS is right now!

Tags

Drupal, Joomla, WordPress

You are reading Water & Stone Reporting on Open Source CMS Market 2008 an article from Joomla , WordPress & SEO by Herbert-Jan van Dinther

Joomla released a new version 1.5.5 after just three weeks of the 1.5.4. release.

That release had a serious defect in producing duplicate title code in the HTML output, that has been fixed in this new release.
But they did not stop at that… they went on to improve the SEF part of this new version.

Some of these improvements are also targeted to the SEF URLs, especially for Blog section and categories.
If you want to know more about the improvement in this version, please check Joomla 1.5.5. Released

I will keep you informed on the release of the Joomlatwork.com patch for this release.
It will still be a necessity to further improve your Joomla site for better search engine rankings.

For those who have missed the frequent update of this Blog, you can read the reason for this absence here.

This week I hope to have some time to get back into my usual Blogging rhythm again

Tags

Joomla

You are reading Joomla 1.5.5 and SEF Improvements an article from Joomla , WordPress & SEO by Herbert-Jan van Dinther

Today Performics and Google announced there final cooperation into the affiliate marketing by introducing the Google Affiliate Network

Along with this announcement, there was also a small text in your Adsense settings, telling you that the Adsense referral program will end in August 2008.

Last year I wrote a post about Google Becoming the Ultimate Super Affiliate�and it looks like we are looking at the next step…

Closing the referrals opens up new possibilities, but if you want to stay working with CPA by Google, that means you have to apply for a new account into the program.

Becoming a Publisher is also subject to review of your website, and you better check the FAQ�on the publisher�information.
There are several items in the FAQ, like:

I’m already a Google Adsense publisher. Am I now a publisher in Google Affiliate Network?
No, you must complete a separate application for Google Affiliate Network.

Like on the Performics DoubleClick site, Google is Thinking ahead!

Looks like a new era in the Affiliate Markering world…

And you might not be aware of this, but Adsense is just 5 years old… its going to be good times to see how this new Google Affiliate Network will perform.

Tags

Affiliates

You are reading Google Affiliate Network Start, Adsense Referrals Stops… an article from Joomla , WordPress & SEO by Herbert-Jan van Dinther

Joost de Valk has written a great article on his new website about WordPress and SEO, Calling it "The Definitive Guide To High Rankings For Your Blog"  and I must say, he does a splendid Job in working through all the aspects of SEO for WordPress.

And indeed the Blogging world is raving about this article as well:

Here are few links:
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/wordpress-seo/7096/
http://www.searchengineguide.com/sage-lewis/yoast-should-boast-its-wordpress-seo-gui.php
http://www.jaankanellis.com/wordpress-seo-in-a-nutshell-by-joost/
http://sphinn.com/story/52017

And Yoast (that’s right -> Joost ) also does a great Job in monitoring all those incoming links and as a true blogger reacting on every one of them :-) 

You will know by now that I use WordPress,Drupal, Typo3 and Joomla for a number of websites, so I can related to the technical aspects of his WordPress Guide as well as the real Search Engine Optimization stuff.

And this were you can learn as an Search Engine Optimization fanatic, looking at several aspects of this guide and pick the right stuff for improving any website.
That also means Your Joomla based website.

Some of the point you can look at are:
Basic SEO

Permalinks = Search Engine Friendly URL’s

Titles
Descriptions
More text
Image optimization

Than there is more advanced stuff and some great advice on coding and more, you can really do well if you follow his advice on:

Point 5 – Conversion Optimization
Point 6 – Comment Optimization
Point 7 – Off site site Blog SEO, like using Twitter SEO 

I am looking forward to implementing some of his advice here on this Blog and on my other Joomla SEO Blog

Both are build with WordPress to Promote my Joomla sites about Joomla SEO and Open Source CMS SEO

And I must say, that Joost already has inspired me to write a similar post about Joomla and SEO, that is if you as a reader would like to see that as well, covering several technical aspect on how to do this advanced and basic SEO for Joomla.

An Other great article to read is Meet Yoast in which Joost writes about the redesign and the new domain name… also read the comments like "How does it feel to commit Technorati suicide" since your Technorati rankings won’t follow you to the new domain like your FeedBurner readers will.

Thank you Yoast for a great post a great new site and insight into the basic off really well done SEO!

Tags

Joomla Seo, SEO Articles

You are reading WordPress SEO Post and Joomla Lessons an article from Joomla , WordPress & SEO by Herbert-Jan van Dinther