By P.J. Swesey

Joomla’s default URLs, like the standard URLs of any CMS, are terrible for Search Engine Optimization purposes. They have several querystring parameters, they are not human readable, they offer search engines no keywords or insight into what content the page holds, and they use the Itemid parameter to create multiple URLs for each content item. Luckily there are Search Engine Friendly URL components available for Joomla that solve all these issues for us.

I used to use the JoomSEF component on my Joomla websites. It worked very well to create descriptive, search engine friendly, human readable URLs for my web sites, but it didn’t properly remove the Itemid URL parameters. This meant that each article still had several URLs. This was very bad for search engine optimization and for people visiting my sites. Search engines thought I was duplicating content and often indexed the wrong URLs, and visitors would get confused with different URLs pointing to the same article.

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By P.J. Swesey

You may have heard that Google and other search engines prefer that you use dashes or hyphens (-) instead of underlines or underscores (_) as word separators in your URLs. Google actually recommends that you use dashes or hyphens when creating search engine friendly or search engine optimized URLs instead of underscores. Here’s why.

Google sees underlines or underscores as an actual underline character, so a PHP programmer searching for “similar_text” would get results about the PHP function similar_text() instead of all search results for “similar text”. So the hyphens in SEF URLs tell Google that each word is a separate word, while underlines tell Google that your URL is one long word.

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