Changes to Google’s algorithm have the ability to make or break businesses. Google is sending out the signal that you should worry less about the current SEO trends, and more about producing great content, and that they’re “leveling the playing field” for sites that don’t pay as much attention to SEO. Obviously great content is a positive, but at the same time, Google is showing us each month all of the changes it is making, and all the while, providing tips about how to do certain SEO things better.

You knows the basics, right? Great content and a good number of incoming links are necessary for gaining the top SERP (Search Engine Ranking Points) for a particular keyword phrase. The good old way to reach this goal was to build an attractive landing page and add to it as many links as possible.

Everybody tells you to do this and do that for SEO, and SEO companies can be very aggressive on their offerings - and misleading on free advices... But nobody really telling you what you should avoid when you want to increase your site's chances to be rank high on major search engines. And more important, nobody is telling you, that search-engine robots are getting smarter with every new release, they are harder to be fooled, and better mimicking/anticipating the real Internet user's behaviors/preferences. Having these in mind, let's enumerate a few bad ideas, known traps weekend webmasters often falling into:

After I upgraded this site to Joomla 1.7 I wondering, how I can create a RSS feed with all entries to re-create the original functionality we had in the initial site. The problem is that Joomla 1.7 use for this purpose the "Syndication Feeds" module, which picks up the Featured Articles menu item (if any) to create a RSS feed from the currently displayed page.... This works fine - relatively - if you use the default Joomla setup, the Featured Articles menu item being your default homepage. But this isn't my case - and this isn't anymore the case of most of the sites... so I needed to find out something else.

When doing Search Engine Optimization tests you discover that your web pages are duplicated in the Google index. One record is correct and the other includes '?tmpl=component&type=raw' in the url. Usually panik strikes instantly... since the hype about Google's "duplicated content penalty" is still high, giving more, than 1,2 million hits, despite the fact that Google officially denied the existence of a dumb penalty for such a "duplicates", claiming that they are penalizing only copycat pages. so, it's mainly a false alarm... but since all SEO workers are living (and dying) form the confidence - or lack of confidence - of their clients, it's a problem, wich should be solved.

But let's see first, where these links are coming from, then we will find an easy cure for the problem itself.

One of most annoying limitation SEO wise in the Joomla versions prior to Joomla 1.6 was the inability to set directly (without use of some SEO component or a core hack) meta data information for categories. This was important especially on category blog or category list type of pages, where you have left without proper way to control the meta data added to these pages.