Joomla Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

About Joomla

Joomla is an extremely popular open source Content Management System. It is written in PHP and one if its nice features is Search Engine Optimisation. To achieve the SEO Joomla provides a set of rewrite rules that work with Apache, but these rules need some tweaking if you intend to run Joomla SEO with Zeus Web Server.

How SEO works

The SEO in Joomla works by taking a URL like http://www.abc.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=35&itemid=12 and rewriting it to http://www.abc.com/content/view/35/12. Doing this makes the search engine index every page rather than just index.php. The problem with this is the web server needs to rewrite the SEO URL back to the real URL when the client requests it. The rewrite URLs below will achieve this in ZWS.

Rewriting SEO URLs in ZWS

If you have real paths that match /content/ or /component/ then you need to check that the request isn't for a real file. Only use this code if you actually need it because it requires a lot more processing time than the alternative below. You will need to use this rewrite rule:

match URL into $ with (/content/|/component/)
if matched then
map path into SCRATCH:path from %{URL}
look for file at %{SCRATCH:path}
if not exists then look for dir at %{SCRATCH:path}
if not exists then set URL = /index.php
endif

If you don't have real paths like /content/ or /component/ then you only need this:

match URL into $ with (/content/|/component/)
if matched then set URL = /index.php

You need to ensure that in the ZWS rewrite request section, the option to rewrite URI "Overwriting the Request URI" is set to "Leave URI unchanged". Joomla splits the URI at "/" to find the options sent to it, so rewriting must leave the original URI alone.

Mark Boddington [Zeus Systems Engineering] 31 October 2006   15 comments