#9518 – Does removing sh404SEF ruin page rankings?

Hi

At the time of the upgrade, there were tens of thosands of entried in the sh404SEF database. Made for a very large DB - nearly 2Gb worth. 

Ten of thousands of URLs is not a large number and certainly not the cause for storing 2GB to the database (which also in itself would be  fine and not the cause of any concern).

I would need to know which exact database table was that large but out of experience I would guess that sh404SEF debugging feature "Record URL source" was enabled for some reason, and it's the debugging feature that stored that much data.

 Now the client is complaining that his site has disappeared from Google rankings.

He's totally right.

All I can think of is Google had indexed all those thousands of sh404SEF generated URLs and attributed the site as being gargantuan (and therefore authoritative based on quantity), though I thought they would have recognized every page had thousands of unique URLs and ignored all but what I, or they, deemed as the canonical one.

Nothing to do with that.

A URL is the only thing Google knows about a page. All authority and ranking signals, all the backlinks, all the value of a page is not attached to a page. It's attached to the URL of that page. 

Change the URL of a page, and it's a new page. All existing rankings and signals are lost. It's like the site was just created today.

I changed nothing else major except removing sh404SEF. Is this possible?

You cannot change URLs on a site if you care about SEO. That's the only thing that cannot change.

In addition, they may have been using sh404SEF for other things, like custom meta data. Also sh404SEF was providing basic structured data and likely OpenGraph meta data (for social network sharing). All that is gone as well.

If you made that change recently, you should rush, install 4SEF and attempt to recover the exact same URLs you had. Then if they were also using the more SEO-related features I mentioned above, look into 4SEO. It can import them from sh404SEF db tables.

Unless you wiped out ALL sh404SEF db tables, in which case this data is lost.

Best regards

Yannick Gaultier

weeblr.com / @weeblr

Hi

Rereading your reply, should I have bought 4SEO instead? 

No, 4SEF deals with SEF URLs, hence the name.

> If you made that change recently, you should rush, install 4SEF and attempt to recover the exact same URLs you had. 

With only 4SEF, you'll get only SEF URLs and nothing else.

If you're interested in anything SEO (meta data, structured data, sitemap, content replacer for linking, redirects, canonical, ...), then it's 4SEO - but  you still need 4SEF for SEF URLs.

Best regards

Yannick Gaultier

weeblr.com / @weeblr

Hi

However, in my Extension Update section sh404SEF is still showing. 

As you restored a backup, I'm not sure you're on J3 or J4 now. On J3, just uninstall it per the instructions. Read the instructions, they matter,  especially the part of about removing database table of not when uninstalling.

On Joomla 4, not much can be done. Like all Joomla 3 only extensions, it should have been uninstalled while still on Joomla 3.

So you can first try to uninstall it using the Joomla installer, but that would fail with a fatal error at some point. Nothin you can do about it, but that will remove some of the stuff.

Then you'll have to:

 - delete all the sh404SEF_* database tables

- delete these folders:

- /adminstrator/components/com_sh404sef

- /components/com_sh404sef

- /plugins/system/sh404sef

- /plugins/sh404sefcore

- /plugins/sh404sefextplugins

- /system/shlib

That should do it for the most part.

Best regards

Yannick Gaultier

weeblr.com / @weeblr