#8945 – Do I need to uninstall other SEO and sitemap components first?

Hi

All my four websites have OSMAP installed, so I want to check whether I should uninstall all of these other components before attempting to install and configure 4SEO.

They won't interfere. The only thing is that you may have 2 different sitemaps, one from OSMAP and one from 4SEO (but not right away, 4SEO only builds the sitemap once it has crawled and analyzed the entire site).

The sitemap is supposed to be advertised to search engines by adding a line in your robots.txt. 4SEO does that and I assume OSMap does as well.

Once 4SEO sitemap is ready, 4SEO will automatically:

- add a line in your robots.txt file to tell search engines that a sitemap is available at such address

- send the sitemap to Google (you do not have to do that manually)

You can use 4SEO "Robots.txt" file editor to check if OSMap also list its sitemap address in the robots.txt file. If so, you can comment it out (by adding a # symbol at the start of the line where the OSMAP sitemap is listed).

I would not worry too much about this at this stage, the sitemap is not going to have a major or fast impact on an already indexed website.

What do I do about the existing sitemaps created by OSMAP? Or does 4SEO take care of that?

4SEO cannot take care of that because it has no knowledge of what other extensions do (and how you configured them). It also cannot remove anything wihout your explicit consent.

I manually submitted those to Google Search but have not been good at submitting them anywhere else!

There's nowhere else to submit them, except maybe Bing?

Apologies if this is an absolute rookie question, but I don't want to crash anything - or perhaps I need to wait until I do the J4 upgrades - just waiting for some other template and components to be ready for that.

I would advise you do not wait, anything that can be sorted out BEFORE you make to move to Joomla 4 is more easily done and a problem already solved (4SEO itself does not care whether the site is J3 or J4).

There's no risk of crashing anything really but it does raise a question: you should not do any of these big changes on your live sites. You should first test them on a copy of these sites, whether on a separate location of your hosting, or maybe on your local machine.

It may be OK to do this right now with 4SEO on live sites, but you certainly do not want to upgrade to Joomla 4 on the real sites, it has to be done on a copy. That's something you need to sort out before trying to move to J4.

Best regards

Yannick Gaultier

weeblr.com / @weeblr

Hi,

My difficulty at the moment is that some of the sites are active (online shopping transactions, events and membership sign-ups) that perhaps may start sending out reminders from the dev site or things of that nature.

You do have an option in Joomla configuration to disable email sending globally:

That's what I use in such case, as indeed you don't want emails to be sent out. Acymailing is an exception, it does not use the global Joomla email option and so you need to disable email sending in Acy if you use it.

I will probably wait until things quieten down over the year-end before attempting such a big upgrade.

Year-end is not that far out! Installing and configuring 4SEO is not something that will "disturb" your site. It does a lot of "undercover" things, but nothing that will disturb the site operation from a visitor standpoint.

Best regards

Yannick Gaultier

weeblr.com / @weeblr

Hi,

Yes, a dev site is a pretty much required thing these days, you need to be able to test things out before making any significant change to a real, live site.

I will leave this ticket open in case you need to add something. It will automatically close in 2 weeks if no further comment is made.

Best regards

Yannick Gaultier

weeblr.com / @weeblr