Hi all,

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.

Hi all,

If you use sh404SEF Google Analytics reporting feature - providing you with easy to use Google Analytics reports right in your site admin or on the frontend, you may have noticed since the last sh404SEF update a large warning explaining that this feature will soon stop working.

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.

Hi all,

As of today, we are discontinuing wbAMP, please read on to learn what that means exactly.

Why?

Over the last few months, we have seen Google, the originator of the AMP specification, move away from it. First, all signs of AMP pages - the amp icon - have been removed from the Google search results. Then the requirement that only AMP pages could appear in Top Stories and news carousels was dropped, meaning any page can do so while AMP was required before. And then the lead developer has left Google quietly a few months back, while other prominents AMP team members have also left, or moved to other positions within Google.

Finally, and more importantly, Core Web Vitals has been strongly promoted as the new way to promote speed in the seach results.This tells us that we are approaching the time where Google will drop AMP entirely.

We're not alone in thinking so: Twitter dropped AMP links in their mobile app and some large publishers - not all - start dropping it as well.

As such, I came to the conclusion that continuing our development effort on wbAMP was not a worthwhile  pursuit anymore: the SEO benefits of AMP do not offset the required work both for us and for site owners. There are better ways to do SEO on a Joomla site now.

Note that this decision is not linked to the need to migrate wbAMP to Joomla 4. We actually already did the work, more than a year ago (you can download the Joomla 4 version of wbAMP from the development versions downloads page). But I never released it publicly exactly for this reason.

Hi all,

Since 4SEF private beta announcement, a group of dedicated sh404SEF users have been testing and reporting issues on 4SEF. We've been hard at work fixing these issues, and adding features or changing things and I now feel it's stable enough for everyone to look and test for themselves. As such, 4SEF is now in public beta phase, meaning all sh404SEF subscribers can download, install and test it.

During that same time, we have also completed development of the sh404SEF data import feature in 4SEO, also available as beta since a few days ago, and so the path from sh404SEF is now ready to be tested and completed.

Still in beta testing?

Yes, 4SEF has been used by a number of advanced sh404SEF users but it needs to be exposed to a more varied set of websites. Likewise, sh404SEF data import into 4SEO has only just been completed, and while much simpler, it's safer to have a beta testing phase.

Please note that:

• 4SEF is and will be available to all active sh404SEF subscribers to test on their site - or rather a copy of their site!  
• 4SEO import from sh404SEF is available from 4SEO version 2.0. 4SEO itself is not a beta version, only the sh404SEF import feature is.

4SEF version 1.0 beta

 4SEF 1.0 beta is meant for testing. After the initial release, limited to a small number of people, it's already working pretty well, and can be used on real website today, just with a bit of caution. It's also been tested mostly with native Joomla content and common 3rd-party extensions.

If you use less common 3rd-party components, they likely have not been tested yet with 4SEF.

Once this phase of public beta testing is complete, 4SEF will be released to all sh404SEF / 4SEF subscribers.

It's worth mentioning again that there will be only subscription for both sh404SEF and 4SEF. If you have an active sh404SEF /4SEF subscription, you can use either extension at will on your site. 

4SEO data import from sh404SEF 

With 4SEF, you can automatically build great SEF URLs, that are not dependent on Joomla menu items. All articles have the same address, regardless of whether they are linked from a menu, once or multiple times.

But sh404SEF also had some SEO-related features such as:

• managing metadata: page title, meta description, etc
• creating redirects or canonical links

4SEF is purely a SEF URL extension, and these SEO features are now handled by 4SEO. If you have a lot of custom metadata and redirects created in sh404SEF, 4SEO can now import these directly from sh404SEF.

Hi all,

It's happening: JoomlaDay FR will be in Bruxelles, Belgium on May 20 & 21, and this time, it's not all videos and online and recordings but we will all be together, in person, in a venue. How about a welcome change from the last nearly 3 years!

I'll be attending and speaking, together with a bunch of French-language and international speakers. Not too late to register and travel to beautiful Bruxelles, registration is here!

Note that:

• the event is mostly in French of course, but there are some English-language sessions as well (see the program)
• it won't be livestreamed, this is a real, in person JoomlaDay - the first worldwide since the pandemic started actually

Cheers all, looking forward to meeting again fellow Joomlers,

Yannick