Better sitemaps creation and more efficient Joomla SEO analysis with 4SEO 1.2

Hi All

4SEO version 1.2 is out today and comes with multiple features. It has improved sitemaps creation (you can now auto-expire content and have it removed from sitemap automatically) and more efficient crawling of your site.

Let's not forget as well a full Dutch translation!

For a quick intro, here is a 3 minutes video on what's new in 4SEO. [EDIT 2021-10-08: I have added a full transcript of this video below]

Full transcript of 4SEO version 1.2 video

Hi there, Yannick speaking. We just released 4SEO version 1.2 and it has several new features that I'd like to go through very quickly. So here is what's new in 4SEO in 3 minutes:

First, we improved notifications. Now you can click the Dismiss or Remind me later button to get rid of a message either permanently or only for a while.

Now on to the SEO stuff: we've worked quite a bit on improving the Sitemap construction and the site analysis

4SEO now automatically excludes archived content from your sitemap. You don't have to do anything for that, it's enabled by default although you can switch that off in the Sitemaps settings. But the real power comes when you add a sitemap rule. Go to SEO Tools | SEO rules and click New. Fill in a name, maybe restrict the rule to work only on some parts of the site - let's make it run only for a category. And then select Sitemap exclusion as the rule type.

Now you can directly exclude all pages to which this rule applies. In our case, it means all pages from the selected category will be removed from the sitemap. Or, and that's the nice part, exclude content but only if that content is older than, say 90 days.

This all happens automatically, the day an article becomes older than the number of days in the rule, 4SEO removes it from the sitemap and pings again search engines with the updated version.

For site analysis, 4SEO is now more efficient at crawling your site: it does not analyze pages excluded in your robots.txt file, or with a noindex meta tag. It also does not follow links with a nofollow attribute. There are settings under Pages | Settings | Site Analysis to customize this process, but the defaults should make sense in most cases.

Now another area of improvement is 404 errors recording. Until now, 4SEO would find broken links on your site, but it would also record just about any 404s, even if caused by random bots trying to load non-existing pages on your site. This resulted in an error log with many useless records, as you can see here. Now 4SEO will NOT record these random 404s any more, your 404 log will stay clean and only list actual errors.

You can also customize what's recorded under Pages | Settings | Site Analysis using Collect external 404 errors.

Note that other types of errors such as 500, 403 or PHP errors are still recorded as before.

One last important thing, 4SEO is now fully translated to Dutch, thanks to Davy Renckens.

That's it for now, there are many more improvements to version 1.2 and you can find them all in our detailed changelog, in 4SEO documentation at weeblr.com

Hope this was useful, thanks for watching!

As usual, you should check out the complete 4SEO changelog for details of what we added, changed or fixed in that release!

And of course, to learn what's ahead, have a look at a the roadmap: there's plenty to come!

Cheers,

Yannick