joomla site = good for a content/adsense site?

[Sagewing]

Howdy -

I have a client for whom we are building a joomla site. The template is highly seo-friendly (as joomla goes) and it's tableless/xhtml and has very nice levels of keywords/content, etc. It's a great solution for the client because they have a staff of 4 writers who will provide unique content every week - they need this kind of CMS because of the management/approval features and they are familiar with Joomla.

This site is going to generate ad income, hopefully using adsense/ypn. The site topic is quite nichy and the adsense keywords are valuable. It's a slightly competitive space, but this site will be one of the only sites producing unique articles on a regular basis. These unique articles are the primary SEO strategy - the content is the main focus.

My question is:

Is there any reason a joomla-based site would not compete nicely on the search engines? It seems that the search engines aren't really put off by php/dynamic urls' as they were in the 90's, so the search-engine-friendly urls in joomla should be ok. With the unique content growing constantly, we think it should work just fine.

Thoughts?

[tommy_boy]

Good luck with the SEO friendly URL's. I had to forget about Joomla on a site because of them after spending considerable time templating it. The problem is the SEO add ons are 3rd party hacks so when there is a source update they may break. They may also not work from the start.. Just something to consider.

[Sagewing]

Thanks for your feedback.

Just to clarify, I'm not talking about SEF add-ons, etc. - there are too many horror stories about them breaking during upgrades, etc. We are using just the built-in seo friendly URL's so we get [non key-word] URLs like http://www.blah.com/content/category/4/15/26/.

I have it from a trusted source that the LACK of keywords in the url will affect SEO, but in a nominal way. The SE's are getting so much smarter these days and more and more attention is paid to actual relevant content, etc.

So, that's the thinking. I understand that Joomla SEF is a nightmare, but the built-in friendly URLS (like the above) are rock solid and don't break.

[tommy_boy]

Even with the built in there were problems with the other add ons. They all seemed to fix some parts and not work with others. They all had some problems with something.

[Sagewing]

Any suggestions for alternatives?

[Erin]

I've got an SAT preparation (http://www.sat2400.com/) site I'm building in my spare time, and I'm using Mambo/Joomla with an SEO plug-in for Joomla (http://www.sakic.net/products/sef_advance/) that works really well. It's made by one of the main developers of Joomla, which is one of the main reasons why I use it.

I haven't found any problems with it; in fact, I'm quite happy with it. If you want, I could set you up with a test site to try it out. (It'd have to be on my server, though, since I had to register my IPs when I bought the product.)

[tommy_boy]

I tried this one also. With certain add ons it would not work. Also if you look at the feed url's they do not work either.

[Sagewing]

Lots of people are [recently] saying that most SE's pay just as much attention to the regular old SE friendly url's built into Joomla. I wonder if it's true..