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Joomla 1.5 provides substantially improved SEF capabilities by creating SEFs based on the title alias of the menu items, categories, content items. *Section titles / alias, seem to be ignored when creating SEFs.  Instead, the menu item title /alias is used.

This is a clear improvement, but there are still duplicate conent issues.

Let us say we have a section called "News". The system will create a title alias called "news".  This is ignored in related SEFS.

Now, let us link to the section via the main menu using a "section" Article table layout, which produces a "list" of links to categories, then articles.  When we create the menu item we call it "News All - List". The resulting sef will be:

/news-all-list.html

Now, let's create another menu item pointing to the same section, but want to use the "blog" layout. This time we call it "News All - Blog" and the sef will be:

/news-all-blog.html

This is good, because the two have significantly different and unique content.

Additionally, the system shows the same SEF for the related article, no matter if the user navigates from "News All - List" link, or "News All - Blog" link.

/news-all-list/1-latest-news/1-welcome-to-joomla.html

This is good SEO.

However, if the article preference has been configured to show sub navigation links to both the section and the category we get the following SEFs

News section sef = /news-all-list/1.html
News section category = /news-all-list/1-latest-news.html

The CATEGORY sef is OK, and based on the Category Alias.  However, we don't like the insertion of the number 1. But, we can live with it.

The bigger problem is the sub navigation SECTION sef. It has changed.

From the main menu the Section SEF is:
/news-all-list.html

But, the sub navigation at the article level is:
/news