sh404SEF® makes a great addition to the tools, services and techniques in your SEO campaign. We have chosen the features of sh404SEF® very deliberately to maximum the potential of your content and your site. We have also excluded some features for the following reasons:
- sh404sef will not generate automatically description meta tag or keywords meta tags (except in a very limited number of cases, mostly for Virtuemart). Simply because that is a very bad idea for good SEO results. You surely have been faced with the result of computer-generated translated content? Well, if you use automated extensions to automatically generate description tag, this is exactly what you will be feeding search engines with: gibberish ! Description meta tags can be important and help convince visitors to click on a search result link and come to your site. Either take the time to manually fill them in. This is definitively what we recommend. If you can't do that, just leave them empty. Let search engines decide for themselves, they'll do a better job!
- sh404sef will not generate a sitemap.xml file, for submission to search engines. Again, that is just a very bad idea to do it with a Joomla! extension. Sitemap.xml files are meant to provide search engines with an exact list of your site pages, so as to help them crawl it better (how and how much it helps is actually not a very clear fact). To have an exact and comprehensive list of pages from your site, the only solution is to actually crawl al pages of the site, looking for links on them, and following those links as a search engine crawler would do. Otherwise, you are bound to be missing links, and what's the point of submitting a sitemap.xml file if it is not comprehensive ? Crawling all the pages on your site is not something a Joomla! extension can do, as this would exceed execution time set on your webserver, and this is exactly why construction of sitemap.xml file is much, much better left to an external web site crawler, which can perform this task much, much better!
Please note this is different from using a Sitemap Joomla! extension, meant to display a sitemap on your web site, so that your users can see the global structure of your site, and assist them in finding their way. Such a sitemap web page will also help search engine understand the structure of your site, something that matters very much to them (having structured URLs is also a very important element in that matter). We do advise that such user-sitemap page be included on your site, and there are already several excellent Joomla! extensions to perform this task.
- sh404sef will not auto-update itself. It will tell you when a new version is available (and provide a changelog link as well as a download link), but will not install it automatically. The main reason for this is practical, and comes from 4 years of having sh404sef in use on so many sites. SEF urls are at the heart of your web sites, and they interact with Joomla! and the extensions installed on your site. Upgrading to a new version, while very reliable, can still sometimes cause glitches (Joomla 1.5.16 and 1.5.17 anyone ?). It may also reveals bugs in other extensions of your site.
Just like Joomla! project do, we recommend updates to be made on staging sites if possible for instance. In the same way, we have found that having to install from a downloaded file provides a very easy way to roll-back any change. You are never stuck with new version, you can always go back to the previous one in a few seconds. Currently, auto-update systems do not do that, and we are actively looking at the Joomla! 1.6 extension manager to see if it will be able to provide the infrastructure to achieve this.
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