Joomla!® User Group Milton Keynes

I made this error and I don't mind telling you.  It's a really bad place to be in SEO terms but the point is Joomla has a fix as a plug-in for this.  It is NOT a fault of Joomla it is simply an industry thing you have to look out for on all occasions and  on this occasion I goofed.

Here is my error on JLewiSale.com:

Simply put we have the classic www site URL version and the non-www site version.  The two versions share the page rank and thus divide the search ranking power between them - a really bad error.

Many sites suffer from this problem where non-www and www are sourced from the same duplicate content. When most of the links on a site are relative not absolute then Google does not know which version of the content a website is to be known by. The website itself is endorsing bothversions of its website address by using relative links on the site.  A single can start the cascade of problems.  Google is benign and will simply support both versions of the website at half their strength in terms of page position and ranking.  Any website must protect itself from suffering with this problem.

Joomla has many fixes as plugins for this SEO industry problem:

http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/site-management/url-redirection

I always like the simple solutions and when peeking inside the code I noticed something.  The www to non-www redirection does not preserve the URL - it just kills the www address.  It does not matter for this site as I caught the problem early but it does matter for others.

In addition, I am trialling multiple domain parking as a domain move from myolddomain.com to mynewdomain.com and anyone who has done this knows the 301 redirect problems this can cause.

Few of us have the luxury of an established user group who will maintain revenues while SEO traffic losses occur.

A variation of this multi-domain theme is text spinning where two domains exist on the same Joomla installation but their outputs are different and unique.  It could be 400+ domains all parked on the same Joomla installation and they would be all unique.

The two main simple and closely related requirements are to facilitate a new domain name transfer and to control the non-www or www preference.  This portion of code I would be willing to GPL because it has a completely legitimate purpose, namely: establishing a new domain name in place of your old domain name.

When you properly transfer your domain from an old domain to a new one all the page ranking IS preserved.  Yes folks, your client with 'hecktorwillisfrankom.com' can convert into 'http://accountancymiltonkeynes.co.uk/ if you so wished. Nothing is clear and black and white here because 'Hecktor Willis Frankom' may actually be well associated in Google with accountancy.  These sort of domain moves are good for newly established businesses where the promotion and background chatter does not Google associate them with their business or trade.  When such business choose a bad domain name then there is an early opportunity to get them a domain which actually performs well without excessive expense in promotion.

I digress and SEO is as deep or as shallow as you want it.  Just to say Joomla is excellent to fix and do whatever you want in terms of SEO.  You do not need complex add-on components to achieve a good result.  The built in SEO plus a couple of simple components and that is all.