Hi
but not so much an understanding of 4SEF.
4SEF has one main use: maintain SEF URLs created on existing sites by sh404SEF, at least as much as possible.
If you have a site, indexed by Google, and you remove sh404SEF from it, all your URLs revert to Joomla SEF URLs, meaning they change and you lose all the rankings and SEO results you may have in Google (and Bing and all others). You may recover after a few months, assuming you put redirects where needs be, but there's no guarantee.
Besides that, 4SEF gives also what sh404SEF was giving: SEF URLs that:
- do not depend on menu structure (ie you can change your navigation, URLs won't change and you won't lose your SEO results)
- can be customized as needed
Without getting technical what, perhaps should I convey are the top reasons for getting 4SEO for websites that have many years of already being indexed on Google and other search engines?
Being indexed is one thing, ranking is something else. It's all about competition with others. Modern technical SEO, today, is mostly about:
- proper content: which keywords to write for? -> 4SEO Google Search Console integration and data extraction
- internal linking: 4SEO broken link detection and content replacer (for auto-linking)
- structured data: explain to Google what your content is about -> 4SEO full structured data generation
- sitemap: most sitemap created by Joomla extensions or otherwise just list all pages on a site, which is wrong SEO-wise. 4SEO makes a lot of effort to remove many URLs from the sitemap.
- social sharing: Mostly OpenGraph tags generation: full support in 4SEO, especially good at automatically identifying the proper sharing image, the most important opengraph tag for social sharing
Of course, this leaves out backlinks from other sites, which are still very likely a top ranking factor, and of course all your other marketing efforts but in terms of what you can do on your site, 4SEO has it all.
Best regards
Yannick Gaultier
weeblr.com / @weeblr
