SEF = "search engine friendly" and when we talk about SEF in Mambo we are talking about URL's. SEF is only a very small part of SEO (search engine optimisation).
Some people insist that Mambo users *must* use SEF in order to get good search engine rankings. This is just not true. A site with good content may improve upon its search engine rankings if it uses a good 3rd party SEF add-on that produces human-friendly URL's that do not appear like dynamic URL's. For the purposes of this post I will only be discussing the built-in SEF option in Mambo.
Let's look at a basic SEF URL. If you enable it through your backend and rename your htaccess.txt to .htaccess, you will end up with URL's looking something like this:
http : // domain.com /content/category/6/26/61/ Is this any advantage over something like: http : // domain.com /index.php?option=c...d=25&Itemid=55 - actually, no.
The SEF URL is not human-friendly, is not likely to be remembered, and gives no clues to the content of the page that is being generated. In other words, it adds nothing to the browsing experience. But, does it help search engines? No, for the same reason - it contains no keywords, no page title, and does not indicate what the content of the page is.
In the "old days" search engines had problems indexing dynamic URL's. Google even published guidelines that said they may be unable to spider dynamic URL's. Well, the web has changed a lot since then and much of the content these days is dynamically generated from databases. Search engines today have no problem accessing dynamic URL's so there is no advantage to be gained by turning the basic SEF on within Mambo.
There is a disadvantage though - SEF uses URL rewriting through .htaccess, so for every call to a SEF URL the server has to look for the URL, rewrite it to the SEF URL and then deliver it. This causes a performance hit on your site.
So, no advantage in turning on the in-built SEF function in Mambo and a real disadvantage to doing this, so why would I ever use it?
Mambo's SEF functions also act as a base for 3rd party SEF extensions/add-ons. Some of these are very good and well worth using (look for one that provides human-friendly URL's that use your page titles). To use the 3rd party SEF you must first enable the basic in-built SEF function. You will need to monitor site performance, but the right SEF *can* make a difference to search engine listings and will make human user experience better as well.
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