My name is Yannick Gaultier. I'm from France. I'm here to talk today about search engines and SEO and what's happening. Here are the sponsors of the event. I'm not one of them, but let's, uh, so here there are the people who can make this event happen and please use their extensions, their services.
My own company is called Weeblr.com and I have been involved with Joomla since about 2005. I've been doing extensions mostly in the field of SEO. I had an extension that has been running for 15 years called SH404SEF, which was all about SEO. Since the pandemic, I have completely renewed all these extensions and I'm running a series which are now 4AI, 4SEO, 4SEF, 4Podcasts, 4video, and 4logs. Recently, 4Command. All of them have in common that they are focused on SEO or content, which is basically one and the same.
But today, I'm not going to talk about any of my extensions and I'm not going to talk about detailed SEO. Maybe what you're expecting like, what exactly which settings should I set and how should I set them in J to do good SEO? Because of course, that does not exist. That's usual SEO talk. But today I want to talk about HCU and AIO. Does anyone know, is it familiar to anybody here? Oh, that's excellent, that's excellent.
Per the title, here is the full video of my talk earlier this month at JoomlaDagen 2024 about all that's happening in the land of Search Engines (a lot is...)
I am an SEO guy. For the last 15 years, I have kept learning SEO, analyzed SEO blog posts and announcements daily and tried to put all that learning and tracking in a number of Joomla extensions such as 4SEO or 4SEF.
And SEO has been all about content for a while now, so I have also made extensions to assist with content:
4AI since Artificial Intelligence is here now to create content, text or images, translate, check-spell, summarize, tweet or write meta-descriptions
4Video because videos are important for today's sites, but you need to pay attention to performance when adding them
4Podcast as podcasting is a growing medium for people to consume what you have to say
All that to say that I know Joomla fairly well, and here at Weeblr, we have a history of technically advanced, modern Joomla extensions that are maintained and supported over time.
But one thing I am not is a seasoned Joomla website administrator. So maybe I could use a bit of help?
Over time, I've frequently encountered this question, as well as numerous instances where misunderstandings about the term "canonical" and its use in SEO have led to problems, confusion, and a great deal of wasted time.
I've been meaning to write about the concept of canonical for a while and this week, a comment at the end of a support ticket finally prompted me to do so. The comment was :
I need to learn more about what "canonical" means
The thing is, canonical is used (mostly) in two different ways and they seem to contradict each other:
a page is canonical (or not)
a page has a canonical tag
The confusing part is that:
when a page has a canonical tag, it's usually because it's not canonical
It's been a busy last few days and weeks in the SEO and AI world so here is a quick run-down of the latest events. Read-on, several of them may directly affect you:
Google algorithm updates and manual penalties
On March 5, Google had not one but two published algorithm updates:
the March 2024 core update
the March 2024 spam update
These changes in Google algorithms are meant to improve Google search results quality and will be rolled out over the next few weeks.
They are designed both to reduce the predominance of low quality, made-for-SEO websites in search results. In additions to these 2 updates (it's very unusual to have several on the same day), Google started applying manual penalties to a larger number of websites.
