So run a CMS which blogging extention do you use?

[Jazajay]

At work we go with Joomla, and have easyblog installed on it. From experiance however as we are the typical builder, IE: The saying a builders house is always the worst built as he never has time to do it, and our company is by far no exception in SEO terms as most of our work comes via referals and we don't just have the time to SEO our own site. Until about 6 months ago when I said enough is enough.

Finally got round to it and I am doing a bit each month actually having to schedule in time/if it remains scheduled in is another matter, and the first thing I noticed was easyblog had created over 1300+ duplicates which where indexed. I actually work out the actual page count it was creating was about 5 times that. We only have 78 pages at the time to put it in comparison.

Don't get me wrong great software if you are after loads of functions and plug-and-play tech, but a nightmare from a SEO point of view, then also found out our server company let the URL: www.www.sitename be indexed under every URL, as you can imagine haven't found a way of getting rid of them via webmaster tools and had to get very creative with fixing that mess.

Easyblog is great I mean it is by far the switz army knife of blogging systems, even has SEO fields, keywords, meta description, title etc... but will happily go to town on how many different URLs it can think of.

For example 1 blog, and this is just 1 blog not author, archieved blog posts area, tagged blog post area, blog category area etc...etc... can be reached via the following different URL's at least:

main blog url,
blog url with author name in it
blog url with date in it
blog url with each tag in it (If you create 20 tags for 1 article there is 20 duplicates for example)
blog url with the word tags/tag in it
Un SEF URL

I have manually fixed all of these via rewrites but I mean a lot of damage was done. We only had 74 pages 1300+ where indexed.

The www.www. fix I put in place is slowly being resolved and 6months down the line we are starting to hit positions we should have been a while back.

But how do you blog if you use an extention and cater for SEO at the same time?

Easyblog is really easy, even I'm a convert and that is saying something about open source systems, but it is a nightmare from my experiance.