I have had my troubles with joomsef, but it was never the developers fault. I either had my htaccess configured wrong, or the file permissions were wrong... but I got it all straightened out through artio's forum. This product is amazaing!

I love when people make good products for free. This component just works!

I WOULD NEVER RUN A SITE WITHOUT JOOMSEF!!!

This component is perfect

My experience of Artio JoomSEF has been a real mixed bag. On the one hand getting it to actually work was a nightmare, yet on the other, now I've finally got it going it works like a dream...

I'm using Joomla 1.5.2 and when I originally installed (with no problems) JoomSEF, as soon as it was enabled, I received an error message when I tried to view the front end of my site. My .htaccess was sorted, and none of the other usual gremlins seemed to be the problem. Once I disabled JoomSEF the problem went away... After a lot of frustration, I gave up trying to get JoomSEF working and opted for a more basic approach to getting my site SEO'd up by downloading a Joomla SEF patch from joomlaatwork.com. For those of you who don't know, this gives you an "SEO" tab in your site's Global Configuration.

Anyway, even though this worked well, I wanted JoomSEF for a number of other reasons, including getting SEF URLs for Fireboard (JoomSEF have a free extension which is excellent). So, I reinstalled JoomSEF, and suddenly it worked! I hadn't done anything else to my site, so something in the joomlaworks patch fixed my problem.

Now JoomSEF is working properly I've been able to clean up my site from an SEO/SEF perspective and I really would recommend this extension to anyone who wants to rank well.

Works great and flawlessly, even out-of-the-box! Install, configure, enable and there you go!

Though not as many options as sh404sef, this is definitely worth a look! I use it on one of my private sites (A community site) and it worked flawless. Though I do not recommend this free version for commercial sites due to the Copyright tag. (In the paid version it is possible to disable the tag)

Sorry, I usually dont post this, but Im really really dissapointed and frustrated, I spent almost 1 month to discover, that Artio was causing duplicated metatags, my pagerank is on hell, google simply kicks me off, and then I started to use adwords (to try to recover something..)

Im using another SEF, really dont worth install it,please dont waste your time, efforts pagerank etc etc, Its really a shame. sorry author, but you need to fix this ASAP, Im really frustrated and disapointed.

Owner's reply:
Hi, you do not write any details here say what to improve or so. I would bet, that if you had any problems, it was just a matter of wrong configuration. JoomSEF is just a tool to help you improve SEO, but it will not do it with no effort at your side. It cannot do miracles, if it is configured wrong. Sorry.

I have a lot of components and modules, and this is rewriting urls for all of them. This component is the only one that has so many 3rd party extensions.This component did not work out of the box with the .htaccess file provide, but after I just used the standard joomla one with the 3rd party SEF it works perfect.

As for the Advertisements, I do not have a problem with a small straight forward ad in the footer or a link to your site. I think the problem with the meta tag ads is that you are using this SEF component so that you can control the meta tags, and then you realize there are ads in them. I think if you wanted to include a banner ad of some sort, everyone would have less of an issue with it. It seems sneaky to people the way that the ads are in the meta tags. If you want to have your ads in a free version, I feel that is OK, just have a banner or text ad instead of the meta ones.

For Joomla 1.5 native: Rember to create your own .htaccess before installing Artio JoomSEF or this component will try to do it. In Your Server root open htaccess.txt copy all and paste to .htaccess

This software is not worth installing. It does a good job, apparently, but all trouble it brings with it makes it not worth it.

If you're looking for something to boost your Google ranking stay away from this.

At first I was happy, thinking that my visits at Google Analytics were going down just because of the change. Than I decided to buy and install Joomla Tags with it. Well, for the tags to work it was necessary to disable the JoomSEF. Joomla Tags is also another terrible software with an even more terrible support, and worse: you have to pay for the software.

Then I looked up for support at Artio's page and voilá: nobody answers.

In the support forum I found a way to remove the spam, a tip another user. However, spam is really bad for your SEO, it comes in the tags. It's something the Google bot sees and you can only see it in the code (see source code of you page in the browser and you will find links to a hotel in Prague!).

Then I noticed how many duplicates of the same page Joomsef generates. It's a disaster, because visits go to different URLs for the same page, so you'll naver know the real number. It also scrambled my static links to the inside pages, awful!!!!!!

Don't use this, find another software.

Bad support (I'd say actually NO SUPPORT AT ALL), and if you are putting this to improve your ranking at Google than just stay away because it does exactly the opposite.

Owner's reply:
Hello, I think you got that a bit wrong.



As regards duplicates, you can eliminate them quite easily with correct settings and a resonable way to create a content of your site. You can find more information about that in documentation.



As regards the so-called "spam links", those are just generated in meta tag "generator" so that does not really affect Google as you say.



I think your rating dropped just because you did not set the configuration right.



As regards support, did you pay for it Or do you expect to get just all for free? The component plus support? If so, then we are really sorry, but we have to make our living out of something, so we primarily support paying customers.

Hi guys,

Thanks for a great component. At first we struggled with the component, but after thoroughly working with the documentation we had it running within minutes.

We have quite a large website and a huge Business Directory, using Mosets Mtree and I believe that if it was good enough for our large website, then many Joomla users won't have an issue.

I must say that some URL's are not accurate enough, as it sometimes uses numbers (0-9) in the url (.../4.html), but after some manual editing it is ready to go live.

Thanks to the developer(s) of ArtioSEF for a truly great component.

I decided to pay the 30+ euro as i didnt wanted to advertise their so called sponsors.
It does pisses me off that your not notified of this and that without knowing your serving their ads.

I did however expected some support but i didnt received absolutely no reply on my mail.

I can remember long ago when i started using artio the author was available on the forums to help but sometimes complained that all was still free.
I said at that time if we would receive proper support and a good working sef i would pay 25 euro for it..
And damn....thats what he did as it seems.
One minor detail,he killed the support.

Owner's reply:
Hello, for paying customers, there are other channels than forums that are ment for users to help themselves with out contribution from time to time - please see details at http://www.artio.net/en/support.



And please, next time, before critisizing get some info first.

Has hidden spam links that cannot be removed. What happens is Google recognizes these as spam and penalizes your site. For a product that is supposed to help with SEO, it actually destroys any SEO you have done.
You are better of not doing anything to your url'S then adding this, as the spam far outweighs the delivery from a Google viewpoint. Had a site go from #2 in a Google search to the third page two weeks after installing this. Took a lot of work to get it back to even the 1st page. Avoid at all costs!

Owner's reply:
I think you do not know what you are talking about. The links to our sponsors (which are by the way not used anymore) were in such positions (generator metatag), where it has no affect to Google or other search engines. I think that if there were some reasons why your site went down, it was certainly not because of the links there. Otherwise, there would not be thousands of users using this component (also its free version).

Just a note for french users, some versions of Artio Joomsef and also the free adaptations don't have all the non ascii character replacements needed, so here is what you need to add to the configuration.


Á|A, À|A, Â|A, Ä|A, É|E, È|E, Ê|E, Ë|E, Í|I, Ì|I, Î|I, Ï|I, Ó|O, Ò|O, Ô|O, Ö|O, Ú|U, Ù|U, Û|U, Ü|U, á|a, à|a, â|a, ä|a, é|e, è|e, ê|e, ë|e, í|i, ì|i, î|i, ï|i, ó|o, ò|o, ô|o, ö|o, ú|u, ù|u, û|u, ü|u

Wonderful product. All my urls have been re-written. Those long lines of jargon are gone. I recommend this product. Thanks guys.

Hey Guys,

I have been using JoomSEF for almost 1 year. Here are some things I like and some things that I think are not cool at all...

Pros:
-Free Version and Pro Version
-Easy install
-Easy setup/config
-Good Documentation

Cons:
-SPAM/Advertisements are hidden in the FREE version without letting end users know. I feel this is wrong on so many levels. At least give us a banner warning before downloading or installing onto our sites.
-Support is terrible

Those are just a few of many more. Should this be allowed by Joomla standards (the SPAM)?

Owner's reply:
Hi,

1) its no spam in my opinion

2) the information about the links is published here on Joomla Extension site and also on almost every page on our own site, including the download page

3) support is available primarily to paying customers, sorry

4) the so-called SPAM links have been removed anyway, now, the latest free versions only link to us as authors, similarily as other free components (FireBoard, VM, ...) do



Thanks for your positive feedback anyway. Just, if you have been using it for a more than a year, why just 1 point?

When I start to use this component I thought it's grate and now I been using it almost 5 month and I say it's more then "Very poor" mainly because I have on my site 786 posts and I have 5580 created joomSEF urls, SO DON'T USE THIS COMPONENT