Skip to content

Commonly used terms used when managing URLs

URL

Uniform Resource Locator: the address of a page on your website. Usually similar to https://www.example.com/blog/first-blog-post, but can take many forms. Within 4SEF, we normally drop the website address and list URL only using /blog/first-blog-post

SEF URL

Search Engine Friendly URL: A Joomla-specific term that designate the public URL used on your website pages.

This is not what Joomla itself uses internally, as it would not know what to do with /blog/first-blog-post, for instance.

Non-SEF URL

A non-SEF URL is the Joomla internal version of the SEF URL. This is what Joomla can understand and use to display the appropriate content when someone requests /blog/first-blog-post.

Non-SEF URLs are similar to index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=12&Itemid=42

Duplicate URLs

A common term used in Search Engine Optimization when several SEF, public URLs actually display the same content. This can happen with Joomla when there are multiple non-SEF URLs, typically varying only by the menu item they identify, which can cause multiple SEF URLs to be created while the underlying article displayed is the same.

Search engines do not like this usually, altough it's suspected the effect is minimal on smaller sites, less than a few hundreds or thousands pages.

This does not happen with 4SEF, which makes sure multiple such non-SEF are transformed into one and only one public SEF URL.

Redirect

The action of sending a visitor from one page to another. Your server - 4SEF - can perform such action for various reasons. The most common one is when the address (the URL) of a page has been modified.

Say that you customized the address of your last blog post from /blog/first-blog-post to /blog/all-of-joomla-seo.

If either some visitors or most importantly a search engine has previously found and indexed the /blog/first-blog-post URL, they are going to try and visit that page again, or send visitors to it.

But because you changed the URL, this old address now returns the 404 Page not found error.

Instead of that, 4SEF - or your server if you configure it to do so, will redirect anyone asking for /blog/first-blog-post to /blog/all-of-joomla-seo automatically.

  • visitors will not notice and just see the article they wanted to see
  • search engines will notice the chance and update their record to now go directly /blog/all-of-joomla-seo