Yannick Gaultier, developer of third party Joomla! extension, 4SEO, was this month interviewed for an article in the Joomla! Community Magazine.
Yannick is also the developer of 4SEF, 4Podcast and 4AI amongst other useful extensions.
Yannick identified three "common modern SEO misconceptions or mistakes" plus some useful SEO tips for working more efficiently in 2024. And I think it is safe to conclude that he knows what he is talking about, for during the course of the interview he states:
"Although I don't do business as an SEO consultant, I track every piece of SEO news, data report and documentation that happens every day, study and try to distill all this knowledge and information into my extensions."
Read full article at: Joomla! Community Magazine (August 2024)
Three common modern SEO misconceptions or mistakes
Spending time on writing meta description
Quote: "Meta description are not used for SEO, and are rarely used by Search engines when displaying search results, they prefer adapting the description based on whatever their user searched for.
Spending lots of time on this is hard to justify in 2024 and this will likely be more and more so as AI responses are added to Google and Bing search results.
With AI, descriptions are just not there any more."
Insisting on having a sitemap
Quote: "It used to be that sitemaps would help discover pages on your site, but that's not the case anymore.
Sitemaps are there to tell search engines which pages you'd prefer them to crawl and analyze.
Sitemaps start to become useful when you have large sites, with a few thousands pages or more.
Google documentation says you don't need a sitemap at all under 500 pages."
Redirecting 404 Errors
Quote: "I have seen lots of websites where admins insist on redirecting each and every 404 error to... something - usually the home page.
Just don't do that. 404s are fine, that's how search engines update their index quickly. It's not a sign of low quality and does not hurt your rankings.
You should fix the ones coming from your site but most are from random robots and redirecting them is just a waste of your time and your server CPU.
There's only one case where a 404 needs redirecting: when you moved some content from one URL to another.
And in that case you should add the redirect before you get any 404 anyway."
More about WYNCHCO Solutions
Our Mission
Ken Edwards - Company Founder
We help and support managers responsible for Joomla! CMS websites in UK business, academy school and third sector organisations which subscribe to WYNCHCO Joomla! CMS Help and Support.
We support organisations in Cheshire, Manchester, Merseyside, and the North West region from our office in Warrington. If you are based in the UK but outside the North West, we can still help.
Our Mission is to put you in control of your website.
We enjoy keeping up-to-date with the latest Joomla! developments, trends and best practices and sharing our expertise with you to help you optimise how you use your Joomla! CMS website.
We work hard to develop and maintain long-lasting customer relationships.
The WYNCHCO Customer Care Code
We aim to deliver excellent support to our customers at all times.
We pride ourselves on building long-standing close-working relationships with our customers.
Key words
- Collaboration.
- Flexibility.
- Shared Purpose.
- Trust.
Our commitment
To provide you with:
- accurate and up-to-date product information,
- helpful solutions to support requests,
- transparent invoicing,
- SSL encryption when you visit our website.
To monitor our services to ensure optimal performance.
To safeguard your personal data.
To resolve your concerns promptly and professionally.
To pay our suppliers promptly and in return ask that our customers do the same.
