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Joomla SEF Component Reviews

There are many different SEF components available for Joomla to make URLs like this:

index.php?option=com_content&Id=1

Look like this:

/joomla-sef-component-reviews.html

SEF stand for Search Engine Friendly. Each Joomla SEF component has its strengths and weaknesses. I have tested each of the components mentioned in this article, although some more extensively than others. I will review:

• OpenSEF Review
  
  
• JoomSEF Review
  
  
• SH404SEF Review
  
  
• JPromoter Review
  
  

The two I have spent the most time with are OpenSEF (a popular open source component) and JPromoter (a commercial component). I have also done some testing on JoomSEF and SH404SEF.

OpenSEF (Open_SEF)

OpenSEF was my first experience with Joomla SEF URLs. It got the job done, and made my sites perform a lot better than the out of the box Joomla URLs, or even the standard Joomla SEF URLs. As I soon found out, however, it has some potentially serious drawbacks.

OpenSEF Server Load Performance Issues

The first big problem I had with OpenSEF was server load performance issues. My hosting accounts are set up to require each website to use no more than 5% of server resources in a 24 hour period. As my SEO succeeded on a particular site, traffic increased considerably, and I noticed severe spikes in server load. Load was beginning to exceed 15% of server resources during short bursts of activity.

Not knowing what the problem was at first, I tried Ircmaxell's PageCache component, and that helped measurably. But it did not solve the problem permanently. I tried deleting extraneous mambots (plugins), modules, and components from the Joomla site. Nothing had an effect.

Finally, I uninstalled OpenSEF and installed JPromoter (which I had already started using on other sites with a lot of success). Here are the server load stats, with the 5th being the first full 24 hour period with JPromoter installed:

 Day  CPU Time

 Execution Time

 CPU Usage

 Memory  Processes 3 2146.36s 6302.21s 6.21% 2.57 MB 2896 4 2508.42s 6519.56s 7.26% 2.49 MB 4114 5 650.08s 2739.77s 1.88% 2.53 MB 2670 6 550.88s 2786.88s 1.59% 2.49 MB 2597

I was thoroughly amazed at how much of a server resource hog OpenSEF had been, and how efficient JPromoter was.

Even more telling is the daily server load stats, which clearly show the time period on the 4th that I installed JPromoter:

Hours  CPU Time

 Execution Time

 CPU Usage

 Memory Processes  0-6 1349.41 s 3315.99 s 15.62% 2.59 MB 1410 6-12 355.97 s 858.21 s 4.12% 2.38 MB 529 12-18 579.43 s 1184.45 s 6.71% 2.47 MB 1372 18-24 223.61 s 1160.91 s 2.59% 2.43 MB 803

OpenSEF Feature Issues

OpenSEF has at least two major problems facing it for SEO:

You must click on a URL before it becomes SEF for future visits. This is a horrific pain if you have a lot of pages on your site.

Because you must click on a URL to make it into an SEF URL, it's possible (and common) for search engines to crawl URLs and index them before the SEF URL gets created. This is bad SEO, because it allows multiple URLs to access the same content, which search engines can view as spam. Will it kill your chances of getting good rankings? No, I achieved a PR 4 for a client using OpenSEF. But I'm confident that now that I've installed JPromoter, that will go up to 5 or 6 soon.

OpenSEF's built-in Google sitemap generator doesn't work. This was a big problem, since sitemaps are a major part of my SEO strategy. I got repeated errors submitting my sitemaps to Google from OpenSEF because OpenSEF included all links on the site...not just links within my domain. Sitemaps don't work that way. They are solely for a single domain or subdomain.

JoomSEF (AKA Artio JoomSEF)

I read some good reviews of JoomSEF and decided to give it a try. I found JoomSEF to very user unfriendly and gave up using it after a short time. One of the most annoying features of JoomSEF was the constant prompting to clear the SEF URLs after every save of the configuration changes I made. Once URLs were created, to change them was a nightmare. I tried clearing the SEF URLs, clearing the cache, logging out and back in, etc.

It's possible my experience is unique and that JoomSEF is a great component. I just didn't have the patience to deal with it.

I do like the feature set in that it handles custom redirects without having to create them in a .htaccess file. In other words, if you have moved pages, JoomSEF can be configured to automatically Redirect 301 them to the right page. This way, each moved page will still retain its Google PageRank.

SH404SEF

This is actually a very good component from everything I've read and the short experience I had using it. I ultimately decided the sitemap tool of JPromoter was worth the tradeoff, but I have to say that I'm tempted to work more with SH404SEF to experiment with search engine performance.

It is based on JoomSEF, so it retains some of the clunkiness of the administration panel, but other than that, it appears to have been vastly improved. Some great SEO features are that SH404SEF automatically redirects both standard Joomla URLs and Joomla Standard SEF URLs to the new SH404SEF URL. This is something JPromoter does not do, although the developer has told me it's on his feature list for future development.

This is an issues mainly when changing SEF components, because the search engines will have the old URLs indexed. Those need to be 301 redirected in order to inherit PageRank from their original URL. In my JPromoter sites, I have developed some advanced .htaccess techniques to manage these redirects, but SH404SEF does make that easier.

The biggest downside I saw of SH404SEF is that it doesn't create a Google sitemap. All of the Joomla sitemap components I've tried have been horrible, and have not produced good, clean, SEF URLs in their sitemaps. This includes Joomap, Joomla Google Sitemap Generator, and XMap.

Sitempa functionality is ultimately why I've decided to go with JPromoter for now, but I will seriously consider a switch to SH404SEF in the future if an SEF Google sitemap generator is included in future releases.

A cool thing about SH404SEF is that it can handle all the redirects and SEF rewriting without a .htaccess file. For newbies who are afraid of .htaccess, this is a pretty cool feature, although the URLs look pretty amateurish in this mode. They look like this:

index.php/section/category/title.html

Instead of this: 

/section/category/title.html

JPromoter

As you may be able to tell from my OpenSEF comments, my current SEF component of choice is JPromoter. Unlike OpenSEF, JPromoter is a commercial component, but if you're serious about Joomla SEO, it's worth every penny of the $25 it costs. Besides the vastly improved server performance, JPromoter has a unique and flexible way for extending its compatibility to other components. Compatibility is obtained by uploading a fairly simple XML file (that the developer of JPromoter will create for free) into a folder on your server.

JPromoter custom page titles and tags

One of the most important features of JPromoter is that it allows you to write custom page titles and meta tags for every page of your site. That's right, every page, including components.

The way it works is the default URLs are generated when a page with links on it is visited. (Unlike OpenSEF, you don't have to click on each link, but you do have to click on each page of your site when you first install JPromoter.) Then, you go into the JPromoter control panel and view the URLs that were created. There, you can change the URL (if desired), and edit all meta tags and title tags.

JPromoter will use the default meta tags of the content item if you don't input custom ones, and it will even insert a customized default meta set of meta tags when it finds no meta tags in the content item.

JPromoter Google sitemap generator

JPromoter's Google sitemap generator is the best I've seen for Joomla, hands down. You have complete control over which pages get published to your sitemap, and best of all, it is error free 100% of the time. No exceptions, even on a site with over 33,000 URLs. Googlebot loved it, and in just a couple of months, that site now has almost 6,000 URLs indexed.

Control over the sitemap is extensive, as well. You can set all URLs to show up in your sitemap be default, or only those you specifically publish. You can also set attributes like no-follow and no-index.