I'm encountering issues upgrading JoomSEF on a website we've purchased it for, as I've been going through routinely updating all the components in the site. However, whilst other components have had no issue in updating, JoomSEF seems to refuse to update. I do think it might be permissions issues, but as I said, other components with update mechanisms haven't had the same problems.

What might I have to do in order to ensure JoomSEF updates correctly? It is kind of important for me to keep the component up to date so to mitigate potential security issues from out-of-date and vulnerable versions of components/plugins/modules/etc.

Hi,
Could you describe the steps you've tried to update JoomSEF and post the error message you got? Thank you.

File not writeable: [file URI here]
Directory not writeable: [directory URI here]

That's what generally comes up as a massive block of red after updating, showing all the files that are downloaded in the update. All I do is after making sure the Download ID is registered in the plugin config, I just go to the Upgrade section in the component options, and just press the Upgrade from ARTIO Server button. And then I get that error.

For some reason your JoomSEF files and directories are not writeable by your web server. This usually happens if the files were uploaded to your webserver through FTP and not through Joomla. You should use FTP or similar protocol to access your website's files and make sure that all files and directories inside the following directories are writeable by your web server:
/administrator/components/com_sef
/components/com_sef
/plugins/system
/libraries/joomla/installer/adapters

Otherwise it is not possible for your Joomla to overwrite the files with the updated ones.