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Right on Steve! This is an excellent comparison that tells it all.

The conclusion really deserves to be moved out of the small print: If you care about SEO, and you have a new project now, do it with 1.0.x and use the extensions available to make the SEO improvements you need.

I do have a small addition to one of your points: Duplicate content is not just an issue with PDF and print pages, it also occurs with content items, due to the way Joomla handles the ItemID. That has always been a major problem with the Mambo/Joomla core with regard to SEO, and it goes for Joomla 1.5 as well as 1.0.x. I described this in my recent article about the current state of SEO features in 1.5 RC3. (German language - see if Google can translate it into something understandable for you - I can come up with a translation if needed.)

Kind regards,
Zorro

This is a great post! The comparison is just what I've been looking for to help me to decide when to make to switch.

One thing I'd like to know more about is the use of sh404SEF to control the page titles and H1 tags. I've read things about it, but it's not clear how it's achieved. Maybe a blog post on this could be on the cards? The page title control is a major downfall of Joomla in my opinion.

Thanks,
Tom

Have you had a chance to review Charl van Niekerk's xHTML project from SOC 2007? Charl indicated it would be released with v 1.5 stable, but, it's available now to download and review (and to adapt/use now, as many of us are). It directly addresses many of the items on your list. (In fact, it goes well beyond these traditional SEO areas and advances into Microformats, a topic I expect to hear a lot of you SEO experts to blog about during 2008.)

We are going to need to continue to work together to advance Joomla! v 1.5. It's our future. Steve - your analysis continues to be an important part of that and I appreciate your contributions to our community.

Thanks!
Amy

Thats a great post - I just read it via Google translator. Do you mind if we translate it and post it here?

Steve - just to clarify, Charl's work is for semantic improvements in Joomla! v 1.5 across the board (i.e., standard tagging, improved meta data, removing tables, validating to strict xHTML), in addition to the introduction of Microformats, where appropriate. It will likely be core v 1.6 which will be fantastic news for everyone! It's no wonder they have asked him to join the developer team.

Excellent post Steve! This answers the questions I have been looking at for the past few months!

Interesting analysis, I think there is more under the surface though....

One thing that 1.5 seems to resolve is the problem of appending article keywords/descriptions/title tags to the global ones. On one RC (I forget which), they would correctly replace instead of append, making the interior pages much better, as we would want with a deep pyramid topic schema.

Second of course, its a few minutes work to slap a template override on and have all the HX tags replace .contentblahblah automagically.

I think a summary would be to say that 1.5 will perform better out of the box, but the "tweaking" potential for 1.0 will remain much greater for a while I would think.

You should really update this post. It would be great.

Hello everybody, and thanks for the well written article and for the comparision charts.

I agree with Zorro: If you care about SEO, and you have a new project now, do it with 1.0.x and use the extensions available to make the SEO improvements you need.

I have a travel website builded on 1.0 with extensions Benidorm Hotels that had no problem with the urls and met all my SEO needs. In exchange, now I'm building a new site, on Joomla 1.5 and I experienced a hard to solve problem. Titles work fine for the static content, but for the menus that show information in a blog style from a category I get duplicate titles... I could not fix this with the alias plugin.

I can say Joomla 1.5 is now a little bit better with sh404 in combination with the SEFPatch from Joomlaatwork. But always a little bit risk with every update.

It is great! I like comparison table

gr8 seo comparison but I wonder if there is a meaning for a title tag in seo
I don't see many article talk about it
even u 4get to talk about it

Thanks for this great article. I am interested what is with Joomla 1.6 and the seo-settings in the wishlist. i hope that the important things will be integrated.

I am still using 1.0 because of this reason, but the main drawback with joomla, plus in version 1.5 is the code structure. I see more themes coming out now placing the main content at the top of the page using CSS, but this should have been worked into the core code, or at least thought about.

Hi,

Great info. One question though, since this article was written in October 2007, how have things changed now?

I am in middle of migrating one of my websites to 1.5 and this has put me off, would love to see an update.

Thank you.

Hi,

This comparison is very helpful, but a little out of date in the meantime.
Are there significant changes now?
I am new to Joomla and wanted to know wich version i should use...

Thanks for your great articles.

Best Regards
Sandro