4SEO version 1.4 has just been released, and it's getting us closer to our goal of a full modern SEO tool for your Joomla site by adding images sitemaps. 4SEO was able to create sitemaps from day one, but images is a slightly more complex topic and we had it on our roadmap for the 4th major release of 4SEO (in about 4 months!).
Rather than a lengthy blog post, I have made a video showing you both 1.3 and 1.4 new features in action, so if you favor videos or text, please enjoy. If you prefer text, I have also included the full transcript below.
As you probably know by now, Joomla 4 was released officially last week. A great event for the Joomla community and we are all thrilled to start using it over the next months.
However, Joomla 4 is not compatible with Joomla 3. Many, if not all extensions and templates must be modified or sometimes rewritten from scratch to work on Joomla 4. This is an important factor to take into account before upgrading any Joomla 3 site to Joomla 4.
What about Weeblr's extensions, sh404SEF, wbAMP and 4SEO?
sh404SEF, wbAMP and 4SEO, the short story
4SEO is easy, it already runs on Joomla 3 and 4 the exact same
sh404SEF will not be ported to Joomla and instead be replaced with a new extension: 4SEF
wbAMP has been modified to run on both Joomla 3 & 4 and will be released in the next couple of weeks
sh404SEF and Joomla 4, the longer story
sh404SEF has been a staple of Joomla SEO for nearly 15 years now. I released it's first version publicly at the end of 2006 and it really took off the next year, when a I started a website to support my various Joomla extensions.
4SEO version 1.3 has just been released and it's an important one because it marks 2 things:
with the addition of the FAQ Page structured data type, we have completed our first round of rich snippet types support
K2 and Hikashop are the first 3rd-party extensions for which built-in support is added.
Structured data support
Structured data is a set of invisible - to your visitors - codes that can be added to pages to help machines in general - and Google and Bing more specifically - better understand the content of your pages. This will generally result in better SEO results, bringing in more interested visitors. And it can also triggers the display of Rich snippets in search results:
In the above example taken from SEMRush article on rich snippets, you can see how beneficial rich snippets can be for additional exposure in the search results:
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]
We just released version 1.1 of 4SEO and its main new feature is the ability to automatically measure and identify pages from your website that fail Google new Core Web Vitals speed checks.
It's an important feature for anyone concerned with Joomla SEO as it replaces previous speed measurements in Google rankings. Measuring actual Core Web Vitals values is hard and you basically have to rely on Google Search Console to get some values.
4SEO automatically measures your site Core Web Vitals and flags all pages failing the test for you.
But how important are in fact Core Web Vitals, how do you measure them and how can you improve your score? We have put together this short video to help you understand better this change and what to do about it.
