Merged Kunena and SEO: Why would I need ANY third-party SEF plugin?

Yes this is pretty interesting topic for me as I have recently stopped using sh404 sef.

Are you saying that without the techniques employed in router.php, the standard Joomla SEO functions can result in degraded system performance for Kunena users?

I have no raw data to support either environment (SEF or non SEF). I don't think using a router.php would be much different to the core SEF. I do know that there are less queries with using the core SEF than when using sh404sef.

A big reason for me to change was that when the option to use nocache on a component (the sh404sef equivalent to defaulting back to the core sef) the kind of URL's generated were like old J!1.0.x style core SEF eg: /component/option,com_kunena (which can cause some problems)

Page rank is not a problem when you use htaccess to 301 search engines to the right pages... eg

This example would redirect an old forum category 3rd party SEF url to a new core sef url, without the loss of page rank.

To answer your question: what benefits there are for Kunena by having add-on SEF components?

As it has been said before, 3rd party SEF is fine for small sites with active administrators with an eye for detail. As the site grows the burden of administering a large table of third party generated URL's can be hard going (Especially when you change something and need to rebuild the redirection table)

You don't need to rewrite any url's, google and any other search engines understands any type of url's just fine, there are many myths about that. Pretty or non pretty url's is absolutely the same thing, who thinks otherwise don't know what is talking about. There are so many myths regarding SEO that is hard for many to see what is good and what's not. Simply put you don't need sh4040sef or joomla built in sef at all. Rewriting url's has absolutely nothing to do with SEO , it's a common mistake and misunderstanding, maybe user friendly url's but nothing more. I can give you many examples of non-sef url's which are very well indexed in google, there are more important aspects.
In conclusion pretty url's for kunena is simply useless.

I only have a small site, and I have sh404sef enabled. It has provided two advantages: first, the urls to threads are really neat:

mysite.com/forumname/1.html
mysite.com/forumname/2.html
mysite.com/forumname/3.html
and so on.

Regardless of SEO friendly this is human friendly. Second, I customized the SEF file to redirect to different menus for each forum category. I also had to customize some of the older URLs in the 1.0.9 templates, so they used the kunena library methods for links.

It was alot of work, and requires very careful coding and configuration, but I think it is worth it. Because the menu hightlights for the forum categories, I could drop alot of the quickjump links and make a more consistent layout with the rest of the site.

Then I made a joomap plugin which lists all threads so by visiting the site map I can update the important cache entries quickly, just by visting the site map. If folks are interested I will share the current joomap and sh404sef plugins for my site.

I believe that users need to have a choice. We will have improved SEF in K1.5, but for small sites external components an offer something extra.

What comes to Kunena & sh404SEF, currently I don't recommend anyone using sh404 URLs with a large Kunena forum. This is because of sh404SEF hasn't been optimized for 1000s of urls and it can really slow down your site.

If someone knows sh404SEF maintainers, please ask them to contact me, so we can fix this issue. I have it in my growing todo list, but we would get the fix faster if it this issue attracts some interest from sh404 people..

Thanks, Matias. That's really helpful information! That's just what I was after. :woohoo:

Probably sh404sef could be faster, it's true. I don't have any benchmark data and haven't looked into the caching algorithm. I would guess it's a linear search. The sh404sef maintainer would probably be glad of assistance if he was contacted directly.

Here's another thought...current Google SEO documents state that pages should not contain more than a hundred links (some other pages on the Web suggest this information is out of date, but the Google docs state they were updated this year). So, reducing the number of links on densely linked pages probably improves ranking if there are very many. Also, this reduces any SEF processing!

So, on the categories and forum thread lists, I removed links to member profiles from the template, just putting the name without a link. This reduced the number of content links which need to be processed on each page by ~30% (the profile links are still available in the message threads). It's just a thought which may be useful to some.

Good idea emeyer!

This , in relation to problems that a user had with K 1.5.3 installation ...

fxstein wrote:

Any particular reason why you are running a 3rd party Joomla SEF extension?

The Joomla 1.5 internal SEF router is amongst the fastest and is fully integrated into Joomla. Here on kunena.com we only turned on Joomla SEF and the URLs are nice and pretty given Kunena 1.5 has implemented a custom SEF URL router.

Might want to consider that. One less thing to worry about.

Hope this helps!

fxstein

and this , too:

Matias wrote:

There are some changes in Kunena 1.5.3 which breaks all existing SEF components. It should be fairly easy to fix for someone who knows the component.

You're fast. Are you living in Kunena forum?

I had to rename some of the arguments (old ones work to keep Google happy and other linkers) in order to get J!1.5 router to work more reliably with less work. If someone wants to have details, I will provide them to that person.

Sh404sef is awesome! It makes my urls beautiful... unlike having all those index bla bla bla.... plus I'm able to have mysite/Josh which to me is a pretty sweet deal, as well as the members.... joomla's seo is pretty good, but sh404sef does a better job in my opinion, and to me what ever makes my site better is worth the trouble!