Mambo SEF URL's - Should You Use Them?

The question of the Mambo SEF (Search Engine Friendly) URL's and whether you should use them is discussed in this tutorial.

In the tutorial, Anatomy of the Mambo URL we looked at the structure of the default URL with Mambo. Today, we will consider the pros and cons of using the default URL, and the alternatives. This tutorial will also look a the SEO implications of your decision.

The default Mambo URL looks something like this: <domain>/index.php?option=com_content&task=category&sectionid=3&id=19&Itemid=12
As you can see, it is difficult to recall for visitors who want to quickly get back to your content, and tells the visitor absolutely nothing about your page.

[SEO Tip:] This particular example, which is a genuine URL, is also very bad for SEO. Search engines these days do not penalise a site for using the ? (question mark) in the URL string if only one or two are used. Three or more in the one URL are penalised - due largely to several question marks indicating potential trust issues. Three or more question marks are often indicative of spam script insertions and searchbots cannot differentiate between genuine, ? loaded sites and spam traps, so will treat all such URL's with caution. Untrusted content is usually not highly rated in search engine results pages.

Unless there is a compelling reason, do not use the default URL in Mambo.

So, what are the alternatives?

Mambo provides a feature called " SEF" - search engine friendly URL's. The output of a SEF URL will look something like this <domain>/content/category/4/11/2/. As you can see, the URL is still essentially meaningless to human visitors, but it is shorter, may *possibly* be remembered, and it has removed the problem of having too many question marks.

To enable SEF URL's you need to change your htaccess.txt file to just use the .htaccess extension (no file name). .htaccess works only on Apache servers however you can achieve the same result on IIS by using ISAPIRewriter.
If you change the htaccess.txt file name locally, use a text editor such as EditPad Lite or some other editor that supports UNIX format text files. Don't open the file in NotePad or any other Windows application (they tend to insert Windows characters into the text which can lead to problems on the server).

From a Windows point of view .htaccess is not a valid file name because it has no name, just an extension. This can cause some text editors to refuse to save it. If you have difficulty saving the htaccess file, try enclosing the name in quotes.

The safest way to change the file name is either via FTP or through your server control panel.

Once you have saved the htaccess file, login to your Administrator backend. Go to Site -> Global Configuration -> SEO. Check that you see the message saying the file is writeable.

Select the radio button for "Yes" and save. You should always make the configuration file unwriteable as soon as you have completed setting it up.

Ok, so now we have our site using Mambo SEF URLs. The URL is still not ideal, but its an improvement on the default URL. Let's review the differences.

Both the default URL and the Mambo SEF URL share one major fault - the Itemid, which is assigned by the link used to access the content, is appended to the end of every URL. Thus, one content item can appear with many different URL's depending on the way the call to the URL is made.

Implications for SEO

Mambo's default and SEF URL's result in the appearance of duplicate content. Search engines do not penalise a site for having accidental duplicate content. What they do is make a decision, based on their search algorithm, about which content items is the most important. What the search engine considers the authoritative content and what you want your potential visitors to find in the search engine results may be two completely different things! It is not uncommon for pdf pages to rank more highly than the actual content itself.

[SEO Tip:] If you absolutely must offer your visitors pdf versions of your content, do yourself a favour and print the pdfs yourself, upload them to your site and make them available through links using the link rel=noindex tag.
Turn off the "print this page", pdf and "tell a friend" functions. If people want to print your content they can use their browser to do so (you can help by providing a print.css file in your template) and if they want to tell others about your site they will do this themselves. You do not need to provide duplicate content on your site in the mistaken belief that it is useful to visitors!

There are several good SEF 3rd party extensions for Mambo. Ask for recommendations on the Mambo forums and ask questions on the developer's forums or via their contact forms. Most SEF extensions provide the ability to create a unique and often human-friendly URL.

SUMMARY:

• Do NOT use the default Mambo URL;
• DO use the Mambo SEF URL;
• Consider using a 3rd party SEF extension to provide additional SEO benefits and an enhanced visitor experience;
• Disable the print, pdf and "tell a friend" features.