Joomla bad for seo?

[BaseballGuy]

I'm considering starting a new site using Joomla.

I performed a Google search on Joomla and found one website that claims it is bad for SEO because it makes use of tables, and does (here is where I got lost) "something or other" that makes the html code not too search engine friendly.

I clicked off the window before I realized I probably should have looked at the date of the article (to see if it is relevant to the current Joomla version).

Anyone heard anything like this?

thanks

[spadilla]

If you do a search here on WebmasterWorld you will find arguments on both sides. I personally think that if left in its default state, Joomla is quite SE unfriendly - there are duplicate content issues etc. BUT there are some decent extensions to combat this. SH404 seems to be the most popular. Once you get the hang of things, you can bypass using a third party extension in lieu of a properly formatted htaccess file, robots.txt and some other modifications.

[T_Miller]

The original Joomla (1.0 series) had a reputation of being SEO unfriendly "out of the box". Nothing that wasn't fixed with a couple tweaks and add-ons within minutes of installing on the server though.

The Joomla 1.5 series is much more SEO friendly "out of the box" when you activate the built-in SEO features. I have several sites using ONLY the built-in SEO features and they do quite well.

And there's quite a few SEO add-ons that let you tweak SEO even more if you feel the need.

Was that site offering solution? Or just trying to sway you to another CMS?

People say you can't blog with Joomla too. ;)

[edited by: T_Miller at 10:17 pm (utc) on May 10, 2009]

[BaseballGuy]

No, the site was "pro joomla".

This is going to sound bad....but I can't code a site for nothing. Found that CMS's can be tweeked to the way I like. I don't like Wordpress because it looks too bloggy, even with the free templates out there.

Saw some really cool looking Joomla templates that make the website look like a website...instead of the bloggy look that Wordpress has.

[T_Miller]

No, the site was "pro joomla".

OK, I think I know what page you were on ;)
If I'm right, it was geared towards the 1.0 series.

1.5, I think you'll do just fine with the built-in SEO features. Once you get rolling you may find other tweaks you want to add.

You don't really have to doing much coding with Joomla if you don't want to. There's a lot of great templates out there.

Adding components, modules, plugins is pretty easy in Joomla.

[mergen]

We do quite well with Joomla sites. One of our sites that we started last year... already has pagerank of 4 and receives up to 600 visitors a day just from search results.

the only thing i have against joomla is that it is resource intensive and it is not quite as well for seo as, say wordpress

[projectmanuk]

We transferred our site (already well established in terms of SEO) to Joomla CMS last year, and it has been a smooth work. No ranking drop at all noticed. Of course, we used SH404 for URL rewrite.

[philoutsource09]

hi,

This is the first time I heard about this problem with joomla, is this really true? Because I'm a joomla user too.

But I think in the 1.5 version of joomla, you can now add or install SEO components or either use the SEO features of the site itself.