Netshine Hosting

Yes. By default, the website addresses for pages generated by Joomla (except for the home page, usually) are not search engine friendly.  This is because they are made up of a series of code values which tell Joomla where to look in its database to find the content to display for the page.  For example, a typical Joomla web page address might look similar to this: 

http://www.mydomain.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1&Itemid=1

Your website users will not normally notice this, as they will be navigating to your pages by using the links and menus on your website.  However, when search engines come accross addresses like that, they will often ignore those pages.  Search engines prefer addresses that contain normal next, without any question mark (?) or ampersand (&) characters.

In order to force Joomla to make the web page addresses search engine friendly, it is necessary for the server to allow 'URL rewriting' (technically speaking, an apache web server must have the 'mod_rewrite' module loaded).  You can then switch on search engine friendly URLs in Joomla, and have your web page addresses appear similar to this:

http://www.mydomain.com/content/view/1/1

You can make the page addresses even more search engine friendly by installing a component such as OpenSEF, which allows your page addresses to use the names of your content items or other keywords that you choose, so you can create web page addresses like this:

http://www.mydomain.com/my-keyword/my-page.html

...and the component will then internally translate that into the format Joomla needs in order to understand what content it should display.

All of our hosting accounts come with support for search engine friendly URLs.  For more information about how to implement this feature, see the article in our knowledgebase (available to our signed-up clients only).