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A client wants to build a new Joomla website in two phases. The first phase is a very simple website with mainly a blog. The blog would appear on the home page. The second phase will include the rest of the company's content and will have the blog appear on the Main Menu. But for phase 1 the blog (which are Joomla Articles) is going to appear as domain.com/article.

The concern is not to lose the SEO from the blog in phase 2 of the website. So how can we make it so in phase 1 the home page which will display the blog and the blog articles appearing as domain.com/blog/article so that when we complete phase 2 none of the SEO efforts on the blog is lost?

The intention is to build this website correctly the first time so none of the SEO from the blog is disrupted and needs no redirection in phase 2.

Where and how can this best be accomplished? A Joomla extension? If so, which one? Something in .htaccess? If so, please provide an example or a link to what you have in mind. Can this be handled within the Menu Manager? Or some other option I've not considered?

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    a 301 redirect on the .htaccess might be easiest as it handles the actual work and SEO at the same time.
    – Ville Niemi
    Commented Jul 6, 2016 at 15:41
  • Have you considered using featured articles on the home page? You select with articles you want displayed on the home page by setting them to featured and umfeature them when you have other content you want to display. The blog article URLs remain constant.
    – NivF007
    Commented Jan 28, 2018 at 6:27

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First of all you won't lose your SEO ranking as long as you redirect your visitors correctly. The links Google found shouldn't result in a 404 error page, but redirect to a valid page. This can be the same link structure, but you can also use .htaccess to redirect.

The best way is to change the base/root in the .htaccess: RewriteBase /blog If you want a htaccess-maker for Joomla I can recommend Akeeba Admin Tools.

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Well, final answer depends on many things, but as a basic approach for what you have described I probably would conclude on building the blog section and its url structure under a www.example.com/blog of the Joomla site and use an htaccess redirect for the homepage requests to the /blog for as long as this is what you need.

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  • So for phase 1, you would do a rewrite in .htaccess so that anything that goes to www.example.com is re-written to be www.example.com/blog?
    – Edward_178118
    Commented Jul 6, 2016 at 16:11
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If there's currently a menu item for the site's blog, you can just mark that item as the home page in the menu manager.

As for the SEO, this is probably best handled by an SEO extension. I use RSSEO! This tool lets me set a custom SEF URL for each page, as opposed to the system router's URL.

You might also be able to get the result you want by setting a canonical page URL. RSSEO! also lets me set that value for each page.

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