Joomla! extensions from RSJoomla! - Blog

This article will answer to common questions about Joomla! sitemaps like :

• why use a sitemap?
• how to notify Google, Yahoo! and Bing about the generated sitemap?
• site verification
• sitemap updates

and at the end of the article you will find some recommendations for Joomla! sitemap generators.

Before answering to above questions, let's clarify the differences between the HTML sitemap and the XML sitemap.

Sitemaps help search engines to better understand the Joomla! site structure and also help crawlers to easier discover fresh content.

Generating your XML Sitemap for Joomla! has never been easier with RSSeo!

Enable canonicalization first

Before submitting the sitemap to search engines, enable canonicalization to avoid errors in sitemap.

Is this step important?

Canonicalization is active when a permanent redirect exists from mydomain.com to www.mydomain.com (or viceversa), so when a user types in the browser the name of your site without www in the front, he will be redirected to the www version.
If canonicalization is not enabled, both versions of the site will be indexed with AND without www, because search engines don't know which one to pick, decreasing your search engine rank.

Today we've released RSFirewall! Revision 9, which contains a new feature: it cleans the backdoored versions of Jumi from your website. You can read the changelog here.

Jumi is a very popular Joomla! component, some of our customers being already affected by this backdoor - so we added this security measure as an extra protection layer to keep our customers' websites safe.

As usual, we advise you to run the System Check and follow the on-screen instructions to obtain a better security rating on your website, keep passwords safe and always be up to date with the latest software versions and the latest threats.

We have released a new version of RSForm!Pro adding some new features to our Joomla! form manager including:

• You can export unlimited amounts of submissions with the new Ajax based export tool
• You can add multiple products in the RSForm!Pro - Paypal plugin
• You can add extra characters to the existing validation rules
• There is a new validation rule that accepts only the characters set by you
• You can use placeholders for the file attachments

Need a Joomla! form manager? Discover RSForm!Pro on the RSJoomla! demo

Wondering why in the search engines index, your Joomla! links appear both with and without "www" ?
Until you set the preferred domain to tell search engines how to display URLs in their index, the website will have issues with duplicate content.

SEO disadvantages:

The pagerank will be divided to both versions of the website.
Not to mention that spiders will have a harder time to discover the fresh content because they will be forced to index both versions of your Joomla! website. (spiders have limited bandwidth when crawling a website).

This duplicate content issue can be eliminated easily:

1. choose from Google Webmasters Tools the preferred domain
2. set a 301 redirect