Joomla SEF - When enabling SEF urls, will backlinks using non-sef urls still function?

Question

Got a site that due to bad design never had SEFs enabled. Wondering if I enable them, would all the site's current backlinks linking to non-SEF urls still correctly return the pages or would they return 404?

Answer 1

Direct links to a Joomla article will always work, and Joomla is using it itself to link between articles.

For example, this URL:

http://www.website.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=53:abu-sidra-14-1-looks-value-each-way-bet-at-meydan&catid=17:previews&Itemid=102

is the native one and is giving instructions to your Joomla website to access the article database, so it will always work no matter what, even though the SEF URL is:

http://www.website.com/betting-previews/53-abu-sidra-14-1-looks-value-each-way-bet-at-meydan

However, any alternative SEF URLs which may have been done on the website will not work, e.g. the above SEF URL example with category number (53) removed by some SEF tool.

Answer 2

Your non-SEF urls will still work even if you have SEF turned on.

Before you enable SEF though, ensure you have Apache's mod_rewrite enabled and also rename you htaccess.txt to .htaccess.

Have a look at the Documentation for more in-depth information:

http://docs.joomla.org/Enabling_Search_Engine_Friendly_%28SEF%29_URLs

Hope this helps