Saturday, December 06, 2008

Joomla for SEO and business

Joomla has indeed got better although perhaps not as friendly as Drupal it was also disappointingly a lot less safe. My experience so far is not good, but a good six months have passed since I last spent time on developing a Joomla site, so things may be better now.

Having developed only about 11 sites in Joomla I cannot claim to be a prolific Joomla developer, but I can claim to have some experience and my experience aint all roses it has to be said. Out of 11 sites I have found that about five have not developed too much.

I had hoped to create safe, UGC, SEO friendly sites. I have discovered 4 of those less interesting sites were hacked and blinded with a coy message from the hacker, basically saying hacker woz here - thanks guys, thanks a bunch really helpful, I am sure it was worth your while ruining my surprise.

Strangely the sites I cared about were not hacked - maybe they had more up to date versions of Joomla installed. It is certainly the case that Joomla being open source is quick to have its holes plugged quickly. It seems that there have been a few surprises for the developers, so I am reckoning latest versions will be safer. Note to self: go round and update the version of Joomla installed across all the live sites and revisit the older ones.

I have been disappointed with their so called SEO friendliness too - especially with the sites that are alive and kicking - basically if the content is not linked from the front page, it has not been indexed - again I am hoping this has improved in the latest downloads, although I have found a post that may have the information I need Top 10 Joomla! SEO Tips and Tricks.

I will report back my views and discoveries on the sites - the two sites I am focussing on especially are our Advanced Search Engine Marketing site and our Search top tips site.

Thanks for reading, please leave a comment about Joomla SEO! I will be back soon.

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