#10812 – 4SEF and pagination URLs

Hi

Yes, 4SEF properly handles multi-pages Joomla articles SEF URLs.

I would however argue that if you've switched to the Joomla-style URLs for these articles, and done so for a while now (as in several weeks or months), these URLs are indexed by search engines now and it's likely going to be better to just not change change again.

The only thing you can't change for a piece of content on the web is its URL!

Best regards

Yannick Gaultier

weeblr.com / @weeblr

Hi

was that Joomla included the topmost category in their URLs, for example

Not exactly. Joomla SEF URLs generation is based on your menu items. That's actually probably the biggest SEO issue in Joomla.

So if you have that top category at the start of URLs, it means somewhere on your site you have a menu items that points at this category.

If you did not have any such menu item, your URLs would not have that top category.

And if you did not have a menu item for that category when you build your site and six months later you decide you want to have one ( a common SEO strategy to reinforce the importance of some content), then on the day you publish that menu item, all the URLs to articles from that category immediately change (and the old ones are 404s).

... versus sh404SEF's:

https://www.tallandtrue.com.au/short-stories/a-new-jack

In sh404SFE/4SEF:

- you pick which categories to include or not in the options

- once a URL is built with these options, URLs will not change regardless of what you do to your menu structure and items.

However, I think I chose not to include the topmost category in the URL when I first installed sh404SEF.

That's unlikely. /short-stories/a-new-jack looks like the default settings for sh404SEF/4SEF which is to include the 2 "bottom" categories for an article (in your case, it'd mean you don't have multi-level categorization).

Assuming this is the case, can I configure 4SEF to format the URLs like "https://www.tallandtrue.com.au/fiction/short-stories/a-new-jack"?

Options for building URLs for Joomla content are the same in 4SEF as in sh404SEF.

which is not as desirable as https://www.tallandtrue.com.au/blog/a-dad-and-son-road-trip?sydney-to-bendigo, horsham-and-arapilies etc.

Desirable is a relative thing. "/blog/a-dad-and-son-road-trip?start=1" vs "/blog/a-dad-and-son-road-trip/sydney-to-bendigo" will not make any difference in terms of SEO. You're likely to be the only one to notice about that!

Does my logic sound right to you? And would it work?

Personnally, I would not spend one second working on this. You made the switch to Joomla SEF URLs. There are drawbacks to that - I'm biased - but the multipage articles URLs are not an issue.

Just changing the URLs is an issue but you bit the bullet already and mitigated the damage with rewrite rules so my advice would be not to change URLs if you don't have to.

Best regards

Yannick Gaultier

weeblr.com / @weeblr

Hi

I thought "/blog/a-dad-and-son-road-trip?start=1" would rank lower than "/blog/a-dad-and-son-road-trip/sydney-to-bendigo" in terms of SEO, but I'll take your expert word on this.

No, the actual content of the URL will not have any effect on anything - aside for some very large sites, where not all pages are crawled and it may affect somewhat what gets crawled and not crawled. It may also have an effect on Core Web Vitals measurement, or rather when CWV measurements are not available for a page, Google has said they may group pages together for the purpose of "guessing" Core Web Vitals, and the URL is part of what they use for grouping pages).

I'll also take your advice and not spend another second on this. But I would like to thank you for taking the time to respond to my questions and not pushing 4SEF when it could have been so easy to make a sale. 🙏

Yes, it would have but that's not exactly what I'm after here!

And don't forget I also made 4SEO and 4AI ;)

-- 

4AI is the new AI-powered assistant for Joomla 3,4&5. Discover it now!

Best regards

Yannick Gaultier

weeblr.com / @weeblr