I'm considering migrating my current site (static web pages) into Joomla!. I rank pretty high in all 3 major search engines and do not want to lose these rankings, what do you suggest? Should I go for Joomla!? Should I redirect the highly ranked pages? I'm a bit worried but my site's growing and I need some kind of CMS. Any other option?

Dont ... we have had nothing but problems ...

Tracking codes getting axed by its wysiwyg interface
The required ad-ons to make Joomla worth using for SEO isnt worth it

We have sites that have had nothing but problems and (most) of it can be blamed on Joomla for its poor response to search engine spiders, tracking codes being interupted and loss of reporting and analytics data always left us looking stupid when report day came around

I will confirm with our Dev guys what CMS system they are using now... but I know its not Joomla

I use Joomla for SearchMarketPro and it can be a bit of a hassle to set up. Very powerful and easy to create custom modules though, which kind of makes the whole thing worthwhile. If you're planning to go ahead and are not PHP or Web Design savvy, I'd recommend hiring someone experienced with Joomla to help you.

:cool:

Rob

One post against Joomla! and one post for Joomla!

Hmmmmm, don't tell me others haven't used Joomla in an SEO manner. Please some tips (not fingertips) would be useful here.

Optimizing Joomla for SEO was quite time consuming with moderate results.

Although Very stable and very popular amongst the os community I have seen no real benefits from an seo prospective. Have a look here:

http://www.opensourcecms.com/

There are a few seo plugins developed for joomla but I really can't comment. The fact that these have been developed might give you a clue.

I would not advise you migrate to it, especially if your ranking well. Have you considered geting a custom cms for your website? I had the same issue a while back with one of our sites and got the backend developed for it.

try the freelance networks if your stuck. Getafreelancer.com looks promising.

We work with Joomla and SEO on daily basis.

Advantages - so many easy features to create a good community, buzz and viral marketing.

Disadvantages - the code is really not great for SEO.

We're in the process of running tests, pitting Drupal, Joomla and Wordpress against each other in order to evaluate the three for future SEO projects. We've only been running the test for 3 weeks but big differences are already evident. Wordpress has several 10 ten rankings, Drupal has 2 or 3 and Joomla none. The results are so stark we're going to expand the test just to make sure they're valid.

Long term though, unless you have a widely popular blog, can you build the community with Wordpress that you can with Joomla or Drupal?

Joomla is great as a cms, wp is great for blogging. I am not sure if it makes any sense to compare cms solution with blogging software. Joomla or drupal both provide far greater functionality than the blogging functionality provided by wordpress. Of course it all depends on the functionality you need. If all you are looking for is blogging software, then I would not bother looking into joomla.

We use Jooomla for our VA site. There are many plugins that can help with seo for it. Our urls are all user friendly. We also integrate wp with Joomla for our blog .

Khalid

Hi Khalidh

I'm curious about this ...

What have been your SEO results and have you compared your SEO success with Joomla against any alternatives?

We try to be honest with our clients. We tell them that Joomla IS a great CMS, but to be aware that you will have to work harder than usual at SEO. We try to fill out our blog with Joomla SEO tips.

This is an interesting thread...alledia, perhaps you should take a look at testing Pligg (http://www.pligg.com) as a CMS solution. Pligg represents, perhaps, the future of CMS systems and is unrivaled, IMO, in it's potential to build communities.

Yep, Pligg is a useful-looking tool. I haven't found the right project to use it on yet nor had a detailed look at the code underneath.

How does it rate in SEO terms?

Hi alledia,

We just switched to Joomla couple of weeks ago so we are still in the process of measuring its impact on seo. WP did not support all the different features we needed on our site. The two options we considered were joomla or static pages. With the number of articles we were looking at publishing, it did not make a lot of sense to handle them via static html.



Khalid

If you guys are publishing articles and a lite system would suffice check out articlelive by interspire

I agree with a lot of what people have said here about Joomla & SEO.

Pligg sounds interesting but I would be put off by the Beta status at the moment. If I had a choice for a new CMS I would opt for Plone due its standards compliance. The only problem with Plone is finding a host if you have a limited budget.

As promised, the first results from our test:
alledia.com/blog/seo_competition/january_search_engine_optimization_test_update/

Wordpress has come out a clear leader so far, with Drupal second and Joomla third.

I highly recommend Drupal. It can be easily optimized for search engines (my blog has some tutorials on Drupal SEO).

Drupal for SEO:
* easily make clean URLs
* easily control meta data (description, titles)
* hierarchical site structure and navigation
* tagging
* RSS
* html output can be completely customized
* extensive selection of modules
* and much more...

WordPress is excellent also. For a heavy-duty site with user registration, content sections, and other features, use Drupal. WordPress makes a great lightweight CMS.