How to Notify Search Engines of Changes to Your Joomla Site’s URLs

By Seamus Bellamy and Steven Holzner from Joomla! For Dummies, 2nd Edition

Although you may be happy with the look and functionality of your Joomla site now, that doesn’t mean you won’t want to make a few changes down the road. If those changes effect the layout of your site’s navigation menu, search engines may find that many or all of the URLs it had on record for your site are dead.

This is bad news for an administrator interested in maintaining their site’s page ranking. Up until the release of Joomla 1.6, site administrators needed to be proactive to avoid this sort of headache, manually creating 301 redirects in their site’s .htaccess file in order to inform search engines that the web pages had moved, so that the search engine could update their indexes accordingly.

Fortunately, the Joomla Development Team has introduced the Redirect Manager to the latest version of the CMS.

The Redirect Manager makes notifying search engines of changes to your site’s URLs a breeze. Not only can you create redirects manually to be proactive with the redirection process, but it will automatically log all “404 – Not found” URLs for you. Then you can simply specify what page you want the URL that generated the 404 to be redirected to, and Joomla will handle the redirections for you seamlessly.