Today I am going to talk about something I see many people fail to do right, and that makes them go straight to the bottom of the search results. Again and again and again.

The problem of changing url’s is especially common amongst us that uses a content management system like Joomla to control our content.

The reason changing url’s makes it impossible to rank well for a site, is the fact that the complete structure of the site is made up by those url’s. The crawlers of the search engines are following those url’s, and if they keep being different, the pages will never get any Page Rank, and therefore they will never rank in the serps eighter.

What can be done then, you might ask?

If you are using Joomla, you NEED to get hold of any of the components for SEF-urls. I have used both OpenSEF, JoomSEF and Sef Advance, and my recommendation is different depending on what other components you are using.

If you are going to run a web store with VirtueMart on your site, I would go for JoomSEF with their commercial add-on for VirtueMart. It works wonders for getting rid of the ItemID problem that is plaguing Joomla.

If you will not use any third party components, Sef Advance is my first choice. It does not slow down your site at all (almost), and keeps the url’s completely stable even when you do upgrades of the core system.

OpenSEF is hard to recommend right now. It is still not out of beta, and it slows down your site heavily. Untill they have sorted out the speed problems, and have also gotten rid of the tendency of changing the produced url’s I can not recommend using the component.

What is your opinion?

To give a bit of background for new readers, a googlebomb is a technique used to make a sertain page rank for a search term that is not on a page. I could for exaple try to rank this page for the term “click here” without the text “click here” being on the page anywhere.

Try to do a search in Google for “click here” and you will see that the website of Adobe.com is on the first position in the search engine’s results pages (serp). This used to be the case for the “miserable failure” and “liar” as well.

When you search for these terms now, the sites of the President and the Prime Minister are no longer on the first places in the serps.

What does this mean then? As far as I can see, Google has by this change in policy actively entered the political landscape in a much stronger degree than before. By manually removing these terms they are making a political statement -and I am not to sure if I agree that they – as a publicly traded company, should actually make political statements like this.

It sends a very strong signal to the public: “Don’t try to make political statements through the serps that we don’t agree about. We will simply REMOVE your opinions”.

So there you have it folks. Googlebombs are no more.