RSJoomla! Blog - RSSeo!

The new revision comes with some new functionalities, fixes and improvements, from which the most important are the keyword attributes, sitemap protocol and the updated Joomfish integration.

1. Keyword attributes

The attributes option, included in RSSeo! rev. 9, enhances the existing keywords functionalities.
In the newly created configuration option, you can add attributes, javacript codes/triggers, styles and classes.

Keyword attributes examples:

The target attribute:

The last 2 RSSeo! revisions have brought among new functionalities, some important crawler changes: the ability to use RSSeo! without loopback connections.

What does it mean?

To be able to analyze site pages, RSSeo! must first crawl your website. In order to perform this task, it requires at least one of the following functions to be enabled: cURL , fsockopen , fopen , file_get_contents. Most hosting providers impose some restrictions in using these, only allowing one of them and loopback connections. The last one (loopback), basically implies that a script can't get the content of page if the call to the function is made from the same host. You can imagine that this seriously affected the RSSeo! functionality, preventing the proper meta data management.

Beginning with RSSeo rev. 7 and 8, there are 2 more options available to run RSSeo!, besides using the loopback connections: connection via a configured proxy server and PHP exec function.

Recommended workflow:

Option 1: Loopback connections via cURL , fsockopen , fopen or file_get_contents

(available for all RSSeo! revisions)

This is part of the RSSeo! minimum requirements: to be able to run RSSeo! you must have enabled at least one of the following functions cURL , fsockopen , fopen , file_get_contents.
In case your hosting provider doesn't allow loopback connections, then head to the second option.

This article will answer to common questions about Joomla! sitemaps like :

• why use a sitemap?
• how to notify Google, Yahoo! and Bing about the generated sitemap?
• site verification
• sitemap updates

and at the end of the article you will find some recommendations for Joomla! sitemap generators.

Before answering to above questions, let's clarify the differences between the HTML sitemap and the XML sitemap.

Sitemaps help search engines to better understand the Joomla! site structure and also help crawlers to easier discover fresh content.

Generating your XML Sitemap for Joomla! has never been easier with RSSeo!

Enable canonicalization first

Before submitting the sitemap to search engines, enable canonicalization to avoid errors in sitemap.

Is this step important?

Canonicalization is active when a permanent redirect exists from mydomain.com to www.mydomain.com (or viceversa), so when a user types in the browser the name of your site without www in the front, he will be redirected to the www version.
If canonicalization is not enabled, both versions of the site will be indexed with AND without www, because search engines don't know which one to pick, decreasing your search engine rank.

Wondering why in the search engines index, your Joomla! links appear both with and without "www" ?
Until you set the preferred domain to tell search engines how to display URLs in their index, the website will have issues with duplicate content.

SEO disadvantages:

The pagerank will be divided to both versions of the website.
Not to mention that spiders will have a harder time to discover the fresh content because they will be forced to index both versions of your Joomla! website. (spiders have limited bandwidth when crawling a website).

This duplicate content issue can be eliminated easily:

1. choose from Google Webmasters Tools the preferred domain
2. set a 301 redirect