We've been busy over the last couple of months adding several new features to 4SEO to make it both easier to use and extend its Search Engines Optimization capabilities to help you get more traffic.
4SEO version 4.5 is out today and there's the full changelog for it of course, but I wanted to get through the main improvements quickly in this post, with a focus on how these new or improved features can help you.
So here we go:
Customize page title and meta description on many pages with a metadata rule
One major addition to 4SEO 4.5.0 is to give you the ability to use patterns to customize automatically page title, meta description, robots tag or canonical with a new SEO rule type: metadata.
Being a 4SEO rule, all the actions below can be executed either on your whole site but also only on one or more pages. All the usual options are there to decide where to set these metadata:
on one or more pages as defined by their address
on some components
on some categories
depending on the value of a Joomla custom field
after, before or between dates
Meta data for search engines
In the simplest form, you can now easily add something at the end of the page title of any page:
This is the day. After a long, much longer than I hoped, 4SEF beta testing period, we're officially releasing today 4SEF, our latest SEF URLs for Joomla 3 and 4 extension. 4SEF has been available as beta for several months and in fact is running in production already on many sites which have transitioned from sh404SEF to 4SEF. But due to how SEF URLs are such a basic building block of any website, it took some time to have enough real world testers for me to feel confident all the bases are covered and we can remove that "beta" tag.
But that's not all: a few months back, looking at the fact not that many people were fans of reading our blog, I decided to experiment in combining it with a podcast. It did not take long for me to be sold on the concept, and so we came up with 4Podcast, meaning today is an exceptional double-release day!
4Podcast lets you very simply run a fully featured podcast with only standard Joomla categories, articles and a dedicated custom field. It's released today at the same time as 4SEF and we'll have a launch discount period, please read on for all details.
We just had a support question regarding how to evaluate and use 4SEO real Core Web Vitals (CWV) measurement, and after replying to it, I thought this might be a good topic to talk about, again. The question was similar to:
4SEO reports a bad Core Web Vitals score for many pages but common online speed test tools give me a perfect score. What's going on here?
There's still a bit of confusion on how Core Web Vitals are used by Google, how important they are (hint: not that much) and how to use the numbers provided.
What are Core Web Vitals?
A quick reminder first: Core Web Vitals is Google's method for evaluating websites performance. These measurements are used when Google ranks pages in search results, which is why they get a lot of attention.
Google has used speed to rank pages for a long time, but in 2021 they started using Core Web Vitals, a more realistic method, better at evaluating what real users experience when visiting a website.
The last few months have seen a lot of 4SEO development , with 2 majors releases happening:
version 3 added support for Joomla custom fields
Using custom fields is an extremely powerful Joomla tool, avoids entering data in multiple places and generally makes your life easier
version 4 lets you super-easily connect to Google Search Console and provides you with actionable data
With data from the Search Console API, 4SEO now helps you decide on what to write about and where, on which page of your site. Having the technical aspects of your Joomla SEO right on your site is the base requirement, and 4SEO has you covered already here. But the real, big opportunities are often hidden in Google's own data and knowing what to write to compete is key to getting more and better traffic to your site.
Google has informed that as of October 3, 2022, they will no longer support the "Out of band" method to authorize access to Google Analytics data. As this is how sh404SEF can access your website analytics data to build its backend and frontend reports, said reports will therefore stop working in the coming weeks.
Timeline
September 5, 2022 - a user-facing warning message may be displayed when you try to authorize sh404SEF to access your Analytics account data
October 3, 2022 - the OOB flow is deprecated, meaning new authorizations will be refused
This is all for the best, as this authorization method is not as secure as can be, and poses a remote phishing risk. But for us, it means sh404SEF reporting features will - likely - stop working when this takes effect.
