#8231 – Broken links and Virtuemart

Hi

4SEO is not a replacement for sh404SEF. It is much more advanced in terms of SEO and does many more things, however only sh404SEF works on SEF URLs.

4SEO does not do anything with SEF URLs, and you cannot just remove sh404SEF and replace it with 4SEO, they are different products.

Aloso, you should read our blog post on Joomla 4 and our extensions to learn about our plans for Joomla 4 support - although with Virtuemart you probably have a bit of time before it's working on Joomla 4.

- Does it check broken links internally in the site from page to another page or other types of links?

Yes, and this is one of the things 4SEO can do but sh404SEF cannot. See 4SEO broken links detection documentation for more details.

- When will it be compatible with Virtuemart?

It is perfectly compatible and usable with any extension, Virtuemart or others. It was from day 1.

By having a dedicated support, we can add a better optimization. For instance, we can automatically remove useless pages from the sitemap, or automatically insert structured data on some pages. Currently, you'll have to do that mostly by hand, by adding simple rules.

Dedicated support for Virtuemart is planned in version 1.5, scheduled for release on November 4.

Best regards

Yannick Gaultier

weeblr.com / @weeblr

Hi

Will you keep working on SH404SEF too the following years?

sh404SEF will be supported for as long as Joomla 3 + around 1 year depending on demand. 4SEF will be supported on both Joomla 3 & 4 but of course it won't have the large feature set that sh404SEF and will focus only on creating and managing SEF URLs.

There's one last thing I am curious about and that is if there will be a feature in future that if a page title is altered that there is autmatically a 301 redirect created. Fir instance in Virtuemart if my clients change their product title, it's not working in Google anymore. Magento i.e. has a feature for this

So first this is a problem that does not exist with sh404SEF or 4SEF. If you change a product title, the URL does not change and there's no error.

Second, in Virtuemart, you may change the product title but NOT the product alias. That way URL should not change.

With Joomla SEF, this problem does exist. That's very easy to do in WordPress and likely in Magento, but unfortunately it's not in Joomla due to the fact that the alias is not always used for the URL. The actual URL depends a lot on how the site is structured, that is which menu items are used. So it's kinda hard to know which URL to redirect to and from.

sh404SEF proposes "similar pages" on 404 errors. 4SEO is also getting this as we speak, so that's a good alternative but not the same: user has to click on a link. sh404SEF can optionally auto-redirect to the first "similar URL" but it's off by default because it's not 100% reliable, sometimes we can guess the "wrong" similar URL. 4SEO will not get the auto-redirect feature at first.

Best regards

Yannick Gaultier

weeblr.com / @weeblr

Hi

Do you play with the idea to build something similar to capture all 404's, duplicates and creating and managing SEF url's?

Basically no feature will be lost. SEF URL management is both really complicated and really hard to maintain, which is why I'm putting it alone in 4SEF. Having SEO features and SEF features in sh404SEF really limited what sh404SEF could do in terms of SEO.

As an example, capturing errors: 4SEO already does much more than sh404SEF because it not only record 404s happening on your site but:

- it detects broken links, meaning it tells you "on this page, you have this link /my-blog-post and that one is a 404

- it still records 404s as sh404SEF could do but better, because it's smarter about what to NOT record, avoiding thousands of useless bots-generated errors

- it also records PHP fatal errors, telling you in which component or module the error happened

And lastly, about the error page, next version to be released on Nov 4 (see roadmap) lets you configure error pages so that you can keep your visitors on the site if an error happens. It's both more powerful and much easier to use than on sh404SEF. You can have different pages for different errors (404, 500, 403, etc), in different language, with similar pages suggestions or not (this is all  already done, you'll be able to test the development version today or tomorrow).

And all this much easier to use because of the javascript interface. None of that was possible with sh404SEF really and it's very exciting to be able to focus on positive and important seo-related features.

Best regards

Yannick Gaultier

weeblr.com / @weeblr

Hi

What do you advise in future when SH404SEF stops to maintain duplicate url's and editing of url's like 4SEF?

Anything related to SEF URLs will be in 4SEF. 4SEF will manage duplicates and allow URL customization exactly as sh404SEF does today (well, with a better user interface). What will be gone are:

- redirects,  meta data management, OpenGraph meta data and image detection, structured data, etc anything that's not strictly related to building and managing SEF URLs.

So moving to Joomla 4 for instance means installing and configuring 4SEF and 4SEO. That's actually something that you'll be able to do on Joomla 3 already as both 4SEF and 4SEO work on both.

4SEF will just keep using the sh404SEF data in the database directly.

4SEO will import meta data and all that can be converted automatically (redirects for instance) into its own system. 

Alternatively, you can already just use 4SEO and drop sh404SEF: 4SEO 1.5 has a new feature whereby it automatically redirect any existing sh404SEF SEF URL to its Joomla SEF equivalent. That's already done an working, you can test in the development version. Of course, I do not recommend changing URLs like that, even with redirects, at least for larger or established websites but it's now a possible choice. You'd obviously lose the ability to customize new URLs and you're back to using the Joomla router and SEF URLs.

Best regards

Yannick Gaultier

weeblr.com / @weeblr