Compass Designs .net

There has been much speculation recently about duplicate content in Joomla (Duplicate Titles in Joomla). As I have discussed before, the question is not so much about Duplicate Content, but about pagerank dilution with Joomla URL's.

Although many in the Joomla SEO community have commented on this, there seems to have been pushback from Joomla developers, past or current, that there is nothing to see here, move along. Duplicate titles or URL's don't matter, Google is all seeing.

Its seems that the Grand Mugwump of SEO, Aaron Wall disagrees. He even went so far as to identify a 300% increase in traffic after fixing a duplicate URL issue (he calls it URL Canonicalization).

What can we do?

It seems that despite the initial promise of the new improvements in how URL's were handled natively in the core, Joomal 1.5 will still need a 3rd party extension such as sh404SEF to fix these issues.

Are you using sh404SEF, or just native SEF in your Joomla 1.5 site for your URL's?