Hi
As it stands now, I already use 4SE0 which manages canonical SEF URL as well as sitemaps, and I'm perfectly happy with it, and certainly wouldn't want them to be modified.
So you do not want to use 4SEF then.
Question 1 : In case you already have 4SE0, would 4SEF take all canonical url created by 4SEO into account and use them as is or not ?
No, it's the other way around. 4SEO uses the URLs on the site. It does not know or care how they have been produced.
If you already ran 4SEO on your site, and then install 4SEF - meaning in most cases Joomla content URLs will change, then you'll need to Reset analysis in 4SEO to tell 4SEO to analyze the site again and figure out what the current URLs are, rebuild a sitemap according to the current URLs and see if canonicals are needed.
Question 2: If you have 4SEO and your sitemaps already setup with canonical SEF URL, what are the added benefits that 4SEF actually offers ?
With 4SEF, you won't need canonicals. 4SEO does lots of things but what it has in common with 4SEF is that it solves Joomla duplicate content issues.
4SEF prevents multiple URLs showing the same content by making sure there's no duplicates: all articles have the same URLs, regardless of the way they are linked from menus, or not linked from menu. URL to an article only depends on categories and article titles, on how you navigate to that article. Duplicate content is basically impossible. But you have to use the 4SEF URLs.
4SEO works differently. It does not change URLs, it just uses the existing URLs, whatever they are. But it looks at ALL the pages on the site, and if it sees 2 pages with different URLs but same content, it decides that one is the canonical (/good.html) and the other (/duplicate.html) is a duplicate. And it adds to /duplicate.html a canonical pointing at /good.html to tell search engines to forget about /duplicate.html.
So with 4SEF, there's just no duplicate content. With 4SEO, there's is duplicate content, but canonicals links should reduce its impact in most cases.
Obviously, if you have a large site already well indexed and ranking, you should not change URLs under any circumstances, and certainly do not want to switch to 4SEF, at least with default settings.
Best regards
Yannick Gaultier
weeblr.com / @weeblr
