Search engine friendly URLs, and the settings that bite

Out of the box a Joomla URL looks like index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1. Nobody wants that in an email. The fix is in System, Global Configuration, under SEO Settings.

The four settings

• Search Engine Friendly URLs turns readable paths on. This one is safe.
• Use URL Rewriting drops index.php from the path. It needs your web server to cooperate: on Apache, rename htaccess.txt in the Joomla root to .htaccess first. Turn it on without that and the site goes to 404 on every page.
• Add Suffix to URL appends .html. Purely cosmetic, and changing it later rewrites every URL on the site.
• Unicode Aliases lets aliases keep accented and non-Latin characters instead of transliterating them.

Decide once

Every one of those settings changes the shape of your URLs. Flip one on a site that has been live for a year and you have silently moved every page. Search engines treat that as a new site with a lot of dead links.

So pick them before launch and leave them alone. If you must change one afterwards, put 301 redirects in place from the old shape to the new one on the same day.

Where the URL actually comes from

This is the part guides skip. An article's URL is not built from the article, it is built from the menu item that reaches it. An article in a category with no menu item anywhere lands on a long /component/content/... path, no matter how good its alias is.

If a whole section of your site has ugly URLs, that is the reason. Give the category a menu item, hidden if you do not want it in the navigation, and the URLs tidy themselves up.

The trailing slash

The System - SEF plugin has options for the trailing slash and for enforcing the suffix. Whatever you choose, be consistent. A site that answers on both /page and /page/ has two URLs for every page, and search engines have to guess which one you meant.