Enabling search engine friendly URLs

Note: This was written for Mambo 4.5.1a Stable

Mambo has a special feature to make your URLs Search Engine Friendly (or SEF). This means that your URLs can be converted to a format that is recognized by most search engine spiders, giving your website a higher placement in search results.

An explanation

Website packages such as Mambo generate your website dynamically. Because of this, these websites usually have URLs containing certain special characters, such as ?, =, and &.

For example, the About section of chette.com used to have the following URL:

http://www.chette.com/main/component/
option,com_frontpage/Itemid,1/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=23&Itemid=48

Some search engines do not recognize URLs containing these special characters. This prevents some search engine spiders from indexing the other sections of your website, which may give your website a lower ranking in search results.

This website has SEF enabled, thus the About section has this URL:

http://www.chette.com/main/content/view/23/48/

Because search engine placement is important to a majority of web owners, the SEF feature of Mambo is usually activated.

SEF requirements

In order to use Mambo’s SEF feature, your server must meet all of the following requirements:

• It must be running on Apache
• It must have mod_rewrite enabled
• It must allow .htaccess override

When in doubt, as your host provider if your server fulfills the above requirements.

Enabling SEF

Note: It is highly recommended that you make a backup of your files before doing any modification.

1. Download your configuration.php file from website’s server, and save this on your computer.
     
   Open this downladed file in your favorite text editor.
     
   Now look for the line where $mosConfig_sef appears, and change the value to 1 (the default value is 0).
     
   Don’t change anything else, not even the quotation marks. The line should look like this: $mosConfig_sef= "1"

   

     
   Upload configuration.php back to your server, overwriting the old one.
     

2. Login to your server once again, and look for the file htaccess.txt in your Mambo main directory. Rename this file to .htaccess
     
   Please don’t forget to include the period (.) before “htaccess”
     
   Note: Most FTP clients nowadays allow for the renaming of files by simply right clicking the file, and selecting rename.
     
3. Login to your administration panel (/Mambo/administrator/).

   

     
   Go to Site > SEO. Verify that Search Engine Friendly URLs is set to Yes.
     

4. Test your website. Check if the URLs are already search engine friendly.
     
   If you encounter any
   errors, a good resource is the Mambo’s support community. Don’t forget to do a search first before posting a new thread.