Long belated update...

It has been a very long time since I posted, but it's time for an update.

We have been very happy with Joomla and the sh404SEF plugin for a long time. Well, a couple of years.

Joomla? Easy choice. Not hard to implement, update and modify to suit your needs. A lot of what most people want is available off the shelf, open source and rather very often - free. A top CMS and great add-ons for no money down. Excellent.

Some fo us who are commercial users have dreams of having a number one rank in Google in all the places we want to be in. It's a dream. We look for solutions to help us enhance our chance to make those dreams a reality in part.

For us, sh404SEF was a tool that seemed to have a golden chance to give us a little part of what we wanted. Sadly, it was a complete and abject failure in that regard - but we didn't find out until later.

Our site had the on-board Joomla SEO/SEF capabilities enabled and sh404SEF was added. After a eighteen months, we only had around 180 out of 800 URLs indexed.

Soon after the Ubuntu 10.04 update, we realised that sh404SEF was broken owing to deprecated MySQL commands. The update was not free, so, we decided to abandon it temporarily. We took the "suck it and see" approach.

The site was updated and we lost a lot of index positions. We only had 29 indexed pages! Not what we really wanted to see. Lost indexed pages means less traffic and less market awareness and less new clients. Fucksocks.

Time to fight back. We 301'ed all the 404s to the new URLs. Ran a new site index tool, uploaded to all the right places.

Ka-fucking-ching. Ka-ching. Boom-chaka-fucka-lacka-boom. w000t.

Three weeks later, we had >350 indexed pages out of 800 odd. Our traffic has increased by more than thirty percent. The number of indexed pages and the number of uniques is still growing. The length of stay from new unique IP addresses is increasing - even though we're posting less new content.

Why? Well - the only change we made was removing sh404SEF. That's it.

Us? sh404SEF and our deployment method? Fail.

You? Try it. YMMV.

Us now? w00t. More traffic. More uniques. More customers. More biz. Happier times - for doing LESS.


Cheers - The TechnoHippie.