SEO issues in elxis

[Cristian Herrera]

Hi!
First of all i must say that i love working with elxis and my general opinion is that this is an exelent CMS.
Therefor i would love to contribute to make it an better CMS than it is.
ok, now to my questions.

1. When I use an content page or a component as the first page it automaticly creates a dublicate contents problem.
that is http://www.mysite.tld vill have the same URL as http://www.mysite.tld/[component]/[component-item].html
This will trigger the duplicate contents filter for the most important page on the site, the frontpage.
The fast anwer to this would be using rel=canoical on the component-item but I really dislike it since it is a problem that should not be.
The other fast solution would be to redirect the componet item to the site root, but a 301 would not be apropiate if you plan to change the front page and make the component-item vissible in its original URL.

2. the other SEO issue is one that could be the solution to the first one 
I really would like to se an broken link tracker in elxis and a simple redirect tool (i saw a college of mine using one in joomla, it was really nice), this would help a lot when moving pages and when you need to move the URL of some pages, for instance if you chande the name of a eblog or if you just rearange the site structure for more contents.

/Cristian Herrera

[datahell]

On any URL rewrite based solution you will have the duplicated URLs issue. You are thinking of the front-page but it is not only that. Think that each SEO URL has also a non-SEO equivalent that also works.

The following 2 URLs point to the same page:
http://www.mysite.com/links/ (SEO PRO URL)
http://www.mysite.com/index.php?option=com_weblinks&Itemid=51 (non-SEO URL)

Elxis hides the non-SEO URLs if SEO PRO is enabled but they still exist. This will happen in ANY application uses a URL rewrite technique and the only solution would be to use special rules ( permanent redirect? ) in htaccess file but I do not recommend that as it might cause you other problems (accessibility issues).

I believe that this problem is of minor importance and has no affect at all on the site's SEO rank.

Elxis has a special error 404 page for the broken links. But each SEO PRO extension handles this issue individually. Based on the requested task they might show you the 404 page, a parent page, or even let the component itself decide what to display.

Test it on any elxis site, type for example: http://www.mysite.com/fsdfsfsdfsdfsd/

[ks-net]

i get your point..

to make it a little clear for users to understand what are you talking about:
suppose that you set as first page the component reservations
example.com/
example.com/reservations/
is the same page... so is 100% relative .. it is a duplicate and you might get a penalty from search engines!

but i  can not see any solution to this....

2. the other SEO issue is one that could be the solution to the first one  Wink
I really would like to se an broken link tracker in elxis and a simple redirect tool (i saw a college of mine using one in joomla, it was really nice), this would help a lot when moving pages and when you need to move the URL of some pages, for instance if you chande the name of a eblog or if you just rearange the site structure for more contents.

i can not see how a redirection would solve this issue... still you will have a duplicated page.. even if you rename the page or the url the relevancy will remain still too high

Must Note: this is a problem for any dynamic site.. not only elxis, dynamic content has this problems...

eg. think of page-navigation next and previous buttons,  you have many urls in your site with 100% relative content.. aren't you?



***** users might want more info *******
tools to check:
http://www.webconfs.com/similar-page-checker.php

some external references for users that might interested
http://www.webconfs.com/duplicate-content-filter-article-1.php

edit ...datahell already posted

[Cristian Herrera]

First off all thanks for the answers.

datashell:
I am aware of that the problem exists in all rewrite solutions, and if you activate SEO-pro the rel=canoical should be in the non-SEO URL, however, this is an other problem.
Since I have no links to the non-SEO pages the search engines does not index them and do not create the duplicate contents issue. and an rel=canoical vouls solve this problem.

ks-net:
Yes you got me right.
What I meen with that it could be a solution is that if i catch the request with a 302 - teporarily moved, it will not index the cointents of the content item, and therfor eliminate the duplicate contents, in theory ;-)
And if i later decide to use this contents in a subpage and change the old page i remove the 302, it should work....I think

[EDIT]
But then it would maybe create a problem with the internal linking, since the first link in the main menu would link to the http://www.mysite.tld/[component]/[component-item].html page

[EDIT 2]
Here is some info about the rel=canonical I spoke of before
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html

[ks-net]

Yes you got me right.
What I meen with that it could be a solution is that if i catch the request with a 302 - teporarily moved, it will not index the cointents of the content item, and therfor eliminate the duplicate contents, in theory ;-)
And if i later decide to use this contents in a subpage and change the old page i remove the 302, it should work....I think

this will be a problem...

example.com/
example.com/reservations/ ->302- temporarily moved

what about=>  example.com/reservations/myhotel.html ....? this will be also 302- temporarily moved.. and we don't want this.
you can start playing with .htaccess , but things get complicated, most people will end with broken un-browserable sites.
suppose you want to make things easier and build a mechanism to add a 302(or other) status in any desirable url.. still is hard for common people to configure properly, i mean to setup correctly to get the right effect in search engines!
i agree that such mechanism would be useful to add 404,301,302 etc... in pages... but it will not solve the duplicated content problem, it will only touch it!
also i am sure that you won't be able to  set-track-unset the correct codes per case and url. always something will escape your attention.

the only solution for now and only for the home page is a redirection  example.com/  ==> example.com/reservations/ or what ever
but other dynamically content will still produce duplicated pages (list category staff and filter by ... the most common)


what i am saying is that you can not eliminate the duplicated pages in any dynamic-site .
still i think that there is no  solution to this... at least not a good one !

I believe that this problem is of minor importance and has no affect at all on the site's SEO rank.

if it has then has for all cms,blogs.eshops   out there...
search engines knows this, i don't think they give you a penalty so easy...
i think this filter is  more for content in different sites!

[Cristian Herrera]

thanks a lot, ks-net.
I forgot that mod_alias makes recurssive redirects I use that technique to redirect all http://domain.tld/* to http://www.domain.tld/* since they count as diferent domains by the search engines and I don't want my links spread out to different domains (and also the duplicate contents issue) in the vhost file:

Code: [Select]

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName domain.tld
    RedirectPermanent / http://www.domain.tld/
</VirtualHost>
So a similar technique should be apliable if i use a content item and not a component as the frontpage ie, an article
http://www.domain.tld/[category]/[section]/article.html -> /
but in the .htaccess of course 

As for the other duplicate contents issue, I am not here to discuss SEO ;-) but at least here in Sweden Most SEO's are really affraid of the duplicate contents within a site. I, on the other hand don't se this as such a big problem since no one will be linking to the non-SEF URLs and therefore the search engines will not find these pages.

The problem would be if I start the site with non-SEF URLs and start rewriting them, bacause then both instances will be in the index of the search engine, thats why the three big search engines agreed on the rel="canonical" tag, example:

Code: [Select]

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.doomain.tld/[PREFERED-PATH]" />
However I've got a few hints now so I vill play arround a little on my test site (witch is also my blog, XD) and I will also make a atempt to implement the rel="canonical".
Me and a friend are planing on making SEO friendly secure sites based on elxis, and we are also planing to contribute back to the elxis project.
If you wish I can post my results in this thread if / when I make some progress.

Thanks again
/Cristian