| sh404SEF Joomla 1.5 review |
| Monday, 22 September 2008 04:00 | |
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sh404sef summary and review SH404sef is a well made component that converts Joomla dynamic URLs into clean search engine friendly URLS. This is good for search engine optimization and the goal of increasing SERP and ROI. One nice feature is the component allows user to adjust the hierarchy of the SEF generated. For example. /section/category/article-title.html There is debate as to what is the best SEF to generate. As a general rule, it is best to keep the urls to less than three levels deep: /category/article-title.html. However, this is not always feasible and can easily lead to SEF conflicts sections have identical categories. Potential conflicts aside, we tend to like to use root level urls and the /category/article-title.html architecture. To achieve root level URLS ( /article-title.html), we utilize the custom redirect functions of sh404. This function lets the user manually set any SEF to anything desired. This is a very good feature when converting from a non-Joomla site. Often, in the search engine optimization process, a sites architecture will need change for SEO, usability and organizational purposes. However, when possible, it is advisable to “preserve” your old SEFS. This is VERY IMPORTANT, if your old site has any pages indexed in the search engines. Equally important, it is wise to “preserve” old sef urls which users may have bookmarked or linked to from 3rd party websites. To this point, sh404 has a function for importing OLD sefs, but we found it to be buggy and not well documented. Unfortunately, the programmers only allow for European CSV formatting of import files. Annoyingly, US Excel spreadsheets cannot generate EU csv formatting. Consequentially, the function is nice, but not very useful for US webmasters using excel. However, using the manual redirect function, as well as .htaccess it is possible to achieve a desired result of preserved and redirected urls. Another feature we like is the automatic “delete” lock which occurs related to the sef redirects. In the design / development stage, SEF’s often need to be purged. The programmers of sh404 wisely excluded the custom redirect sefs from the purge function, which saves tremendous amounts of time.. The one function we did not like was the lack of control over the meta data. We did not easily find how to fine tune, and so, we turned it off in favor of custom modifications utilizing Joomla SEO Patch 1.5 and a couple of hacks. There are, of course, many more features which will be detailed later, but overall we rate this component above average and are currently utilizing it until we make a better SEF solution.
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