Compass Designs .net

Over the last few months I have posted a few guides to getting better SEO with Joomla:

• Top 10 Joomla SEO tips for Google
• Simplicity - The Hard Core SEO Joomla Template
• 2 tips to get sites indexed faster in google

I was drafting a quick how to at Joomla Simplweb and I thought I would hare it here. Its probably what I consider the absolutely most important 2 things to do if you are concerned about search engine ranking.

You may have noticed that Joomlashack is now running on Joomla Joomla 1.5. We did a stealth migration yesterday.

We had one problem we needed to address, and it took a while to figure out, so we thought we would share the solution for others.

Our old site used Joomla Joomla 1.0, as I have mentioned before, we wanted to make sure we did a 301 redirect of the Joomla URL's so Google would quickly pick up the new ones and pass the pangerank to the new pages. The problem however was that our 1.0 site used the raw URL:

http://www.joomlashack.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=37

We rapidly discovered that mod-write unfortunately will basically ignore all the php parameters here. You can't get rewrite to pay any attention to them.

There has been much speculation recently about duplicate content in Joomla 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).

I noticed a recent post on Arno Zijlstra's new blog about duplicate titles. He was linking to a recent post from Google where it was said that duplicate content was dead and buried and not an issue.

Unfortunately, I rather think the point might be being missed by everyone.

 I recently got a link from a skype contact about a report that IBM and Websense periodically release. It included open source frameworks such as Joomla Joomla and Drupal.

When it comes to the Top Ten worst offenders in terms of vulnerabilities, big players like IBM, Microsoft, Apple, Sun, Cisco, Oracle and IBM continue to make the list.

But this is the first time that community-developed open source software such as the Drupal and Joomla Joomla! content-management software packages for the Web also showed up on the list.

But that wasn't the most interesting aspect of the story. 

Yes indeedy....

Does Wordpress have better out of the box SEO than Joomla Joomla?

Discuss.. :)

Update:

There has been an "easter egg" of sorts in the title of this blog post. Some have found it, some haven't :)