#8514 – 4SEO & 4SEF functional

Hi

Thanks for your write up. I'll try to respond inline with your questions:

1) Remove the Joomla Generator tag

This is a left over from the years 2006-1010 and serves no purpose and so it was removed. It should have been removed many years ago from sh404SEF.

2) Change repeat h1 to h2

Nowadays, it's totally fine to have multiple H1 and so again, this was removed.

3) Use a name alias

In which context? alias of what name?

4) Use the title of the article as the title of the page in the web browser.

5) Page header configuration. Page title separator and the ability to add text to the page title.

Considering Google now rewrites more than 60% of pages titles, especially when they have | in them, it was not considered the most important thing to do.

You have to keep things in context: 4SEO is bringing:

- full individual page structured data (replace GSD),

- full sitemap generation, an actual SEO sitemap with all needless pages removed,

- auto-canonicalization

- automatic broken links detection

Rewriting the pages title is nice and sometimes can have some benefits, and we do have that on the tracker, it's just not come to the top of the list.

Also you made so many "ads" in your extension, it's so terrible!

The only "ad" is the generator tag and I'm not sure what's the problem with that?

2) Why do all your classes have the prefix "4SEO_ ......". It looks cheap - class="4SEO_robots_tag".

These are not ads. They are here because I have 13 years of experience debugging Joomla websites and I have learned that one needs to know which extension is doing what and where. We also have about the same in sh404SEF, except we do it with HTML comments but comments are removed by HTML content compressors and are therefore lost.

These class tags are absolutely indispensible - and your question #3 below proves it: you have other OGP tags on your page, and maybe they are coming from your template, or maybe from another extension and I wish all extensions would mark their output like we do but unfortunately very few do.

3) Why does the sitemap look like - "sitemap-4seo.xml" Why "-4seo" again? What for?

Likewise, this is a purely technical reason and there's no workaround for it. 4SEO sitemap is virtual, it's not a file on your disk (although of course the content is cached on disk for speed). And so calling it /sitemap.xml will conflict with any sitemap.xml file lying on the server disk and that would prevent 4SEO sitemap to load.

This is not a "wild guess": in the first version, the sitemap was called /sitemap.xml. And it was not working on a significant percentage of our users because they had a /sitemap.xml file left over either by another extension, or by an external tool.

1) What is the point of Google Speed (LCP FID CLS), if not explanations, is it for mobile or desktop version, what are the ranges and gradations for evaluation

Sorry, what? https://weeblr.com/doc/products.forseo/current/pages/performance/

This documentation - which is available right from the component settings, also includes a full video on what CWV are, how they work and whether they matter for your site. Please make sure to check it out.

2) robots.txt - Optimize for SEO. What is the optimization in commenting out a few lines? Why is there no explanation why this is being done and why? Because it's kind of an underused feature.

Same: https://weeblr.com/doc/products.forseo/current/tools/robotstxt/#optimize-for-seo. Not sure what you mean by "because it's an underused feature"? Underused by who? in which context?

3) When Generate OGP metadata is enabled, there is no check for the presence of OG on the site or the ability to control the presence of OG tags. For example, some data is already on the pages that are loaded from the template. And the extension reloads them.

We cannot control what others are doing, and sometimes it's best to have others output these tags. 4SEO tags can be disabled as you see fit, and it's up to you to do what you want and need with the rest.

It also does not make sense performance wise to try and detect these, as there are multiple methods to inject them. For instance, those added in templates are often nearly indetectable, or rather too late in the page building process.

If this happens, I'd strongly advise to disable the tags output by your template, as a template has no way of figuring out which image is the right one to include. Image is the most important OGP tag by far and templates just don't do that detection correctly. 4SEO builds on the years of experience in sh404SEF to auto-detect images and has been even improved there, manual overrides are really, really rare.

Again, it's your choice: disable 4SEO tags, disable other extension tags but that's not something we're going to spend

Is there a possibility that the missing functionality will be implemented in the future in 4SEO/4SEF ?

Aside from automatic title rewrite, which was already set to happen at some time in the future, I'm not sure what's actually missing here.

Should we expect 4SEF next month?

We hope to have have a first beta release before the end of the quarter but you should not expect anything as we only have estimates, not deadlines. We've made some progress but there's a huge number of settings and options in sh404SEF, and they need to be reviewed one by one to decide what's ported and what's discarded, and then implemented. That takes time. The initial estimates were way too short.

your editor does not save html tags

It certainly does not and never will.

Best regards

Yannick Gaultier

weeblr.com / @weeblr

Hi

Its exception is an error. 

It was a waste of time and server resources in sh404SEF. 

Useless or not, it helped to quickly remove the junk code from Joomla, and that's the beauty of it.

Unless there is a reason to remove it, why would anyone spend any server resource removing it. This will never come back.

2) Google has started to forgive two H1 headings,

Or 3 or 5.

Having multiple H2 is just as bad as having multiple H1. It does not make any difference. What would make a difference is having a proper structure. That's not something an automated tool such as sh404SEF or 4SEO can do. You'd need a sophisticated AI to do that and even then it would not work all the time.

3) You write that Google rewrites 60% of headlines. Is the remaining 40% not enough to retain the ability to reconfigure headers and apply |.

No, because it is the ones which are longer and using | that are rewritten.

With it, the code looks ugly, that's all.

Which of course has no importance. What matters is the purpose and it's an important one, that I identified after many years of doing this in real life, with real Joomla developers and websites.

  The same goes for the sitemap. Whether they see it or not, it doesn't matter. 

What do you mean? who sees what?

And it's better to remove the prefix "4SEO_......" from the class name.

Certainly not: it's the main point of having this. Actually, I can remove everything else from the class name. The only important thing is "4SEO". That's the only thin I cannot remove.

 By the way, the template can determine the correct picture

No they can't. The template has no idea what the proper image is. Sometimes, on super simple sites that use articles and put an image in the "intro image" or "Full article image" fields, they can use that. That case is so rare it's not worth mentioning. 

What matters is the ability to:

- detect images in content

- check their size against social network rules

Please point me at any template that pretend to be doing that and I'll show you that it does not. Likely the same for extensions, I have never seen any that can actually detect image in content.

Too bad your extension doesn't check for presence and "conflict-contradictions"

This has never been an issue with sh404SEF, I don't see why it would become one 10 years later with 4SEO. Checking this is next to impossible due to Joomla internals and it does not make sense performance-wise as already explained:

It also does not make sense performance wise to try and detect these, as there are multiple methods to inject them. For instance, those added in templates are often nearly indetectable, or rather too late in the page building process.

If you have arguments and details about how to do it, I'd pleased to hear them.

Once again, I ask you to give the ability to disable the 4SEO generator tag inside the extension, that would be great.

That will not happen. I remember the desire to remove that tag was due to security concerns 10 or more years ago, that attackers would recognize this as a Joomla site and attack it. These days are long gone, that's not how attackers proceed and removing this is jsut useless. Joomla 4 even has an option now to add the Joomla version in it, which is useful for site management and detecting update issues.

However, it is not clear to me for which version of the site the results are returned - mobile or desktop?

Both. We measure the real values, the actual CWV. This is not obtained from Google. So if you have visitors on mobile, you'll have mobile measurements and if you have desktop visitors you have also measurements from that, and of course, you'll have both so the displayed values are the global result, according to Google computation model: 75th percentile aggregated over 28 days.

Best regards

Yannick Gaultier

weeblr.com / @weeblr