Introduction

Site Management, SEF, SEO & Metadata, URL Redirection, Social Share

After more than 15 years of duty, sh404SEF won't be ported to Joomla 4. To move to Joomla 4, please consider our newer extensions, released over the last couple years, including 4SEF to maintain your site SEF URLs (see Related extensions on this page or visit our website) and 4SEO for metadata.
sh404SEF is discontinued from August 17, 2023 - same as Joomla 3 end of support. Please update to 4SEF and 4SEO to maintain your URLs and metadata.


Joomla 4 notice

We created sh404SEF® for Joomla with SEO in mind. sh404sef helps you improve your search engine rankings and get more traffic to your website. Satisfy many of the Google recommendations for search engine optimization with just a few clicks.
sh404sef also includes many security features.

sh404SEF® is the most popular and longest developed Joomla seo extension. We are dedicated, full-time Joomla professionals who work each and every day to bring you the very best extensions and prompt support. Our staff have over 20 years of combined experience with Joomla (and Mambo) and we maintain some of the longest, continually developed Joomla add-ons available.

Brand new documentation set, including "Getting started" as well as other specialized short videos.

Features:
* sh404SEF rewrites Joomla URL to user-friendly format (SEF URL or URL rewriting): mysite.com/index.php?option=com_content&Itemid=69&id=34
becomes mysite.com/en/sh404SEF-and-url-rewriting/list-of-available-plugins.html but it does in a way that prevent Joomla standard SEF duplicate content issues.

  • Important: from version 4.17, we automatically add robots meta tag required for full visibility in Google search results.

  • NEW: Support for Google Analytics version 4

  • NEW: Full Turkish translation
  • NEW: insert a QRCode anywhere, on any page
  • NEW: Redesigned Google Analytics reports, can now also display on frontend without having to log-in
  • NEW: block requests based on simple rules
  • NEW: Redirect mutiple URLs together, no more using .htaccess
  • NEW: Add canonical tags to mutiple URLs in one go
  • NEW: URL shortener can now shorten any URL, not just of current site
  • NEW: extended Structured data support: social profiles, corporate contacts, logos
  • Connector with wbAMP, our Accelerated Mobile Pages for Joomla plugin
  • Automatic redirect of 404s errors to most similar page
  • Google Sitename, Google breadcrumb and Google sitelinks search JSON+LD markup
  • Using oAuth2 for Analytics authorization
  • Twitter Cards support
  • Google Analytics Universal support
  • Google Tags manager support
  • all output through JLayout, easily override in template
  • Create and insert Open Graph data: quickly and easily add social media buttons to your entire site to allow sharing on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Linkedin and Pinterest.
  • Integrated Google Analytics reports display
  • Automatically generate tiny URLs (shURLs) for your content
  • Full urls and bulk meta data management
  • Multi-lingual support
  • Easily redirect 404s to suggested SEF URLS
  • Instantly add global support for canonical URLs (add rel="canonical" HTTP headers)
  • Removes automatically duplicate URLs, a common problem with Joomla websites
  • Create human ear and search engine friendly (SEF) URLs
  • Control URL re-write mode on a per-application basis
  • Support for Google News URL format
  • Easily customize the page title and page description with bulk updater
  • Create customized error pages (i.e. 404) with relevant links, suggest best match pages
  • Harden against cross-site scripting attacks (XSS)
  • Harden against malicious page requests
  • Limit flooding attacks
  • Protect input forms such as the contact page from spam (using Project Honey Pot)
  • Control site access from suspicious domains (using IP address whitelisting and blacklisting)

We Support many third-party SEF plugins via the standard Joomla installer.
Components we support natively include: VirtueMart, K2, FlexiContent, Kunena, Jomsocial, Community Builder and more.

I didn't have any problems installing this and I'm far from a Joomla expert. The .htaccess change was very simple and basic on my Hostgator hosting.



It does what it says, and I'm happy with my purchase. Its a bit weird that they sell it by subscription though. I would rather just purchase it outright, and not have to worry about the payment auto-renewing.
This component was promising but since its been taken over by anything-digital.com it fails to work with secure SSL pages.



Any https page is automatically redirect to a http page rendering vituemart shops useless.



Support provides no answers:



Owner's reply: Hi

Sorry you had problem with this particular question. However, there is no repoted issue within sh404sef regarding https. Setting up the joomla, virtuemart and the web server to operate may however be quite complex, especially on shared host, and thi smay be the reason of your issues. There are many Virtuemart shops running https for the checkout parts as we speak.

I can only encourage you to go back to our forum to try get this setup properly
Thanks and regards

Best SEF tool



Posted on 06 March 2010
SH404 is still the best SEF tool. Has many extra functions for customizing urls. Excellent.

Good product



Posted on 01 March 2010
Very good product for static websites that don't change frequently.



On my website articles and pages are added and deleted frequently and in combination with more then 2000 visitors a day it sometimes give white pages when you click on a link.

You have to purge all SEF urls to fix the problem.



Next to that sh404SEF does not work that good with Virtuemart and give depending on which server specs you use error.



But for the normal website its worth the 25 euro
Owner's reply: Hi geertje
Thanks for your review. You're indeed in a situation where you need to be careful about what urls are stored in the database. I am however very concerned about your comment regarding Virtuemart. In depth Virtuemart support has been a very strong feature for sh404sef from the start,and still is today. We are not aware of any outstanding issue with Virtuemart, so please contact me at shumisha at gmail dot com for details.

Rgds
nice component, but it seems the version has updated within one week of me purchasing it and now i can't get to the website to download latest version.
Owner's reply: Hi

Yes, we try have updates very often. And you can get them for one year after subscribing, so something is not normal here. Please make contact with us so that can be fixed!

Rgds
One of the most important things for SEO in Joomla is getting rid of the long strings that are built for URLs, and have shorter, more English sounding URLs for the search engines. This extension does just that, and does it well.



I can see why a novice may have trouble with it since you have to make and modify the .htaccess file, but if you have a good ftp program, you can figure it out. Or go to a forum and ask for assistance.



I had the hardest time initially getting the Joomla provided SEF URLs to work correctly, but once I had that figured out, I was determined to make this sh404SEF work -- after all, it always made it in the top 10 list of extensions!



It is well worth the small fee to purchase the license and follow the instructions you will see on the successful installation page. Clue: print that page!



I love the smaller URLs, much better for search engine optimization, and the ease of use. And now this extension is in my top 10 list too!
I will preface this by saying I'm somewhat new to Joomla extensions, I'm but no means a web developer.



I paid $35 USD to download this component and was disappointed by its lack of documentation. At least on my site, it wasn't ready to go upon installation.



I had to make changes to my security levels via the FTP site so it would view properly in the Joomla admin area. I had to rename the htaccess file ".htaccess" and save it to the Joomla root directory. I followed what few instructions were available to me as best I could, and finally I gave up on this component after 5 or 6 hours of frustration and little progress.



I found ARTIO JoomSEF to be much easier to use right out of the box. That component configured and renamed my .htaccess file automatically, and I'm able to make custom SEF URLS. In literally minutes, I was up and running.



The research I did said I was to htaccess file and rename it to .htaccess and save it in the Joomla root directory. Easy enough, but

Avoid if you have MyBlog



Posted on 31 December 2009
After a year of struggling with this product, I was happy to see that it went commercial, because I figured it meant that they would acknowledge and fix the only major flaw of which I am aware...



... the core of sh404sef will break your pagination in azrul.com MyBlog component. I have found work around for all other issues using these two otherwise great components together, but for whatever reason the sh404sef people refuse to acknowledge and fix this problem.



The really frustrating thing is that the sh404sef component comes with built in "support" for MyBlog, so is very misleading. Now that the product is commercial, it should come with a disclaimer that it will break your site if you want to use MyBlog along with it.



You would think that the MyBlog and sh404sef people would get together and figure this out, but the problem has been known for months.



It comes down to this... if you don't use MyBlog, then sh404sef is a great component and does exactly what it says. If you do use MyBlog or think you might ever want to, then stay far away from sh404sef unless and until the company acknowledges and fixes the problem.



A word of advice to azrul... it would be very helpful if you would offer the sh404sef team a copy of MyBlog, because the sh404sef people seem to have used the lack of access to MyBlog as a reason not to support it.

POOR SUPPORT



Posted on 23 December 2009
I submitted a question to the forms quite a while ago with absolutely no reasonable response. The import function does not work properly as I have reported.



THIS USED TO BE A GREAT EXTENSION WITH SUPERIOR SUPPORT BEFORE IT WAS SOLD TO ANYTHING-DIGITAL.COM.



This type of vendor is what gives Joomla a bad name.
I am very happy with this product and the $35 was worth it. I had problems with my .htaccess files using mod_rewrite and after 10 minutes with the documentation, I had my problem solved. Now my site has the most beautiful URLs!
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sh404SEF

Version:
4.24.7
Developer:
Yannick Gaultier
Last updated:
Jul 26 2023
1 year ago
Date added:
May 27 2007
License:
GPLv2 or later
Type:
Paid download
Related extension :
4SEF
Includes:
c p
Compatibility:
J3
Download

Uses Joomla! Update System

Score:


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