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#5909 – Joomla Native SEF and articles

Posted in ‘sh404SEF’
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Tuesday, 23 July 2019 17:49 UTC
ire4444
I've been searching the forums on how to address the issue of my SEF urls not working when I let sh404SEF take over control from Joomla. (ex: https://www.xxxx.com/how-cbd-works-and-affects-you). Currently, I have Joomla as default and have turned off "Enable URL optimization" in the sh404SEF configuration. I would love to use your product, but when I turn this feature on my URLS no longer work.

Thanks in advance!

Brian T.
Wednesday, 24 July 2019 06:31 UTC
wb_weeblr
Hi

It depends a lot on what exactly you mean by "not work". Usually you mean you get a 404 from sh404SEF with a message saying something like "Bad karma, we could not find that page".

That's expected and is not caused by the fact that something does not work. It means that sh404SEF is doing what's it's supposed to do (one of the things it's supposed to do actually) and that is changing your URLs.

It's not that URL to article 1 (/menu-item/article-title fr instance) does not work, it's that URL to article 1 is not the same anymore (probably something like /category/article-title). This is mostly intended to fight Joomla-generated duplicate content.

Few things to consider:

- all the links on your site should still work the same, ie if you click on a menu link or click on links you have setup in side your articles, Joomla should update those to the new URLs automatically
- depending on your site history (ie very old, well indexed by search engnes with SEO success vs recent, with little SEO success), you should handle this situation with either redirections or even by configuring sh404SEF to try mimic Joomla URLs, which it can do most of the times - but then cannot fight duplicate content anymore


All of the above is however a general response. As with all support cases, we cannot really appreciate the situation without full and real URLs and a description of what happens (what do you mean by "not work": 404 from the server, from Joomla, 500 errors, etc)

Best regards

 
Wednesday, 24 July 2019 16:53 UTC
ire4444
Sorry that I didn't provide more detail. Basically, if I let sh404sef take over, the legitimate URL I posted earlier (https://www.xxxx.com/how-cbd-works-and-affects-you) takes you to the home page and the message in the browser tab says, "The Page you requested was not found on our site". Something in the config is not letting legitimate URLs work and it redirects to the home page.

I use the Joomla hidden menu and point it to the Joomla article to get my SEF URLs. Any thoughts at what I'm doing wrong?
Wednesday, 24 July 2019 17:05 UTC
wb_weeblr
Hi

Again, what do you call a "legitimate" URL? where did you get this URL from? The hidden menu item? That's not how URL are built with sh404SEF, the menu item is never used (with default settings). The likely legitimate URL for that article would be: /article-category/article-title.

As is common, there are several issues here working together to create confusion:

1 - You assumed the legitimate URL from the hidden menu item but that does not happen with sh404SEF. The URL is based on categorie(s) and title
2 - If that article is only linked from a hidden menu item, it means that link is never displayed and the URL is never created: you will always get a 404 for the legitimate URL because sh404SEF never had a chance to create that SEF URL (that happens when Joomla wants to display the link)
The only legitimate URLs are those you can see in sh404SEF URL manager. If a URL is not in the SEF URL manager then it is a 404 (with sh404SEF default settings).

3 - When a 404 happens on your site, the visitor is redirected to the home - which is pretty bad. This happens most likely because you have enabled back the Joomla router which does that sort of things. You should check that:

- "301 redirect from Joomla SEF to sh404SEF" is disabled under the "Advanced" tab of sh404SEF configuration
- All components are set to "Use default handler" under the "By component" tab of sh404SEF
Those are the default settings and should stay that way. The redirect to home can also be done by other extensions than sh404SEF but that's less likely.

I use the Joomla hidden menu and point it to the Joomla article to get my SEF URLs. Any thoughts at what I'm doing wrong?
As you gathered at this point, that's not how you get the URL for an article. Menu item is not used to build the URL.

Before I suggest how to handle this, I'd have one question:

- if you do not want that article to be linked from somewhere on the site, how are your visitors going to reach it? In other words, why are you using a hidden menu instead of a regular menu or a category blog or similar?

Best regards

 
Wednesday, 24 July 2019 22:02 UTC
ire4444
Ok. Here are my thoughts:

1. I am not an SEO expert
2. I've never used sh404SEF before
3. I've used the native built-in Joomla "hidden menu" to make SEF URLs for years (see screenshots attached)


To your earlier points, how does sh404SEF create the SEF URL? Do I need to go into the article and look for it there?

Thank you again for your patience.

Brian T.
Wednesday, 24 July 2019 22:41 UTC
ire4444
QUICK UPDATE:

OK, I got this to work now.

I was playing around with the sh404SEF config and did the opposite of what you previously suggested - "301 redirect from Joomla SEF to sh404SEF" is disabled under the "Advanced" tab of sh404SEF configuration (which conflicts with your product's documentation).

This now works. :)
Thursday, 25 July 2019 07:29 UTC
wb_weeblr
HI

Glad you got it sorted!

To your earlier points, how does sh404SEF create the SEF URL? Do I need to go into the article and look for it there?
sh404SEF create URLs when Joomla asks it to do so. Most of the times, Joomla asks us for the SEF version of a URL when it needs that URL to display a page.

So if you have a link to an article somewhere on a page (for instance inside a category blog view, or directly in a visible menu, or in a side module such as "Latest articles" or anywhere else really), the instant a single visitor asks to see that page with a link to your article then Joomla needs the SEF URL to display the link to the article. That's when the URL is created.

What's important to understand is that this does not happen when someone requests the article itself. This happens when someone requests a page that has a link to that article.

3. I've used the native built-in Joomla "hidden menu" to make SEF URLs for years (see screenshots attached)
Again, menu items are not used to build URLs when using sh404SEF. URLs are only built based on the article characteristics, categories, titles and can be configured.

(which conflicts with your product's documentation).
Thanks for pointing this out. I will update the documentation right now.

Best regards
 
Thursday, 25 July 2019 14:46 UTC
ire4444
Thank you again! You can close this ticket as [SOLVED].

Have a great day!

Brian T.
Thursday, 25 July 2019 15:14 UTC
wb_weeblr
Hi

You too! Closing this ticket now, feel free to open a new one as needed. If you do so, please mention this ticket number in the new one.

If you created any superadmin account for us, be sure to delete or block it now to avoid unnecessary risk in the future.

Be sure to also check out wbAMP, our new Accelerated Mobiles pages plugin for Joomla - the next big thing is SEO, direct from Google themselves!



Best regards
 
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