SEO Friendly URLs

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SEO Friendly URLs

(24 posts) (4 voices)

Started 3 years ago by john
Latest reply from Prit

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SEO
yied

john
Member

Hi,

After playing a while, I finally got my .htaccess working to do a mod rewrite to translate dynamic links into static ones.

2 Examples >

a) show main page:
original link: http://mydomain.com/blog1/?option=mainPage
new static link: http://mydomain.com/blog1/mainPage.html

and

b) show a specific entry:
original link: http://mydomain.com/blog1/index.php?option=viewEntry&filename=00005
new static link: http://mydomain.com/blog1/viewEntry00005.html

My .htaccess to accomplish the above >

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^blog1/viewEntry([^/]*)\.html$ /blog1/index.php?option=viewEntry\&filename=$1
RewriteRule ^blog1/([^/]*)\.html$ /blog1/index.php?option=$1

I think it would be important to have user friendly urls to improve search engine positioning, do you agree ? I hope this helps.

John

Posted 3 years ago #
Prit
Pritlogger

Thanks again John. This will definitely help Pritlog and its users. For this to be perfect, the Pritlog app also needs to be modified to enable clean URL's in its internally generated links. Maybe there can be an option to enable or disable clean url's.

Posted 3 years ago #
john
Member

It seems that there are 5 link "types" that might benefit, to facilitate full content indexing by searchbots:

- mainPage
- viewCategory
- viewArchive
- viewEntry + filename
- pagination links

I'll post my complete .htaccess as soon as I test the complete rule set.

Posted 3 years ago #
john
Member

The following .htaccess works fine with the 5 link "types" of my previous post (blog1 is the subfolder were I placed the script)

///////////////////////////////
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^blog1/mainPage.html$ /blog1/index.php?option=mainPage
RewriteRule ^blog1/viewArchive.html$ /blog1/index.php?option=viewArchive
RewriteRule ^blog1/viewCategory_([^/]*)\.html$ /blog1/index.php?option=viewCategory\&category=$1
RewriteRule ^blog1/viewEntry_([^/]*)\.html$ /blog1/index.php?option=viewEntry\&filename=$1
RewriteRule ^blog1/viewCategory_([^/]*)_p([^/]*)\.html$
/blog1/index.php?option=viewCategory\&category=$1\&page=$2
///////////////////////////////

This are the clean links I used to test each rule:

http://mydomain.com/blog1/mainPage.html (show main page)
http://mydomain.com/blog1/viewArchive.html (go to archive page)
http://mydomain.com/blog1/viewCategory_xxxxx.html (view cat xxxxx)
http://mydomain.com/blog1/viewEntry_0000x.html (view entry 0000x)
http://mydomain.com/blog1/viewCategory_xxxxx_p1.html (view cat xxxxx page 1)

John

Posted 3 years ago #
klhrevolution
Member

I found an online auto configure website and was able to get seo friendly results.

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule articles/(.*)-(.*)\.htm$ /index.php?option=$1&filename=$2
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?greenvilleroad.info/.*$ [NC]

Posted 3 years ago #
Prit
Pritlogger

Did you also change the index.php to create seo friendly links to pages? As per my understanding, this is also required for a good indexing by search engines.

Posted 3 years ago #
klhrevolution
Member

I'm not sure what you mean by changing the index.php ? Am I to edit the index.php for better seo results ? And if so I want in on that! Please share what you mean!

Posted 3 years ago #
Prit
Pritlogger

Some links like the different entries, comments etc are generated by the index.php and will be of the form index.php?option=viewEntry&filename=00001. The index.php has to be changed to automatically generate this to something like /viewEntry_00001.html. When the search engines crawl the website, they dig through the links on the pages like index.php. So these have to be seo friendly too.

Posted 3 years ago #
john
Member

According to my understanding, links on index.php have to be in the "clean form" (at least the ones that link to content (entries, comments, pages, mainPage, viewArchive, and pagination) You can see the clean links I used to test each .htaccess rule on a previous post.

Visitors click on those clean links (and searchbots follow them). They dont see anything else, but at the server level .htaccess rewrites those links to the "non-clean" form (i.e. index.php?option=viewEntry&filename=00001) required for the script to work transparently as if nothing was changed.

You are able to GET all submited variables in the usual way (I tested it yesterday!)

John

Posted 3 years ago #
Prit
Pritlogger

You are right John. But you only changed the .htaccess right? Did you change index.php? Is your blog available to the web so I can see?

Posted 3 years ago #
john
Member

Hi Prit,

I just used clean links to test my .htaccess rules and everything worked fine.
I didn't change the code on index.php since you are probably working on a more advanced version.
If you like I could do it. Just let me know.

In a previous post you said "Maybe there can be an option to enable or disable clean url's" The easiest way seems to add a new var to config.php ($config_cleanurls ?) and use if.. / else.. to toggle the option.

Posted 3 years ago #
john
Member

Prit, I Uploaded my test blog to http://enbaires.com/blog1/

The code was modified to use clean urls (see post with full explanation)

John

Posted 3 years ago #
Prit
Pritlogger

I looked at the test blog. Great work John.

There should be a way to eliminate the # from being shown in the webpage.

Also, for clean URL's, I think few more places that need changes are the page navigation, the category link below every post and the entries showing in the archive.

Posted 3 years ago #
Bert
Member

Hi John,

Comments don't seem to be working in the Spanish translation. (404)

Posted 3 years ago #
Bert
Member

Also, hitting "Home" (Inizio) gives this:
"The requested URL /blog1/es/mainPage.html was not found on this server."

Posted 3 years ago #
john
Member

I added "clean urls" to some links I forgot to change.
At this point all links to blog content seem to work ok. Let me know if you find a bug.

For people that got error 404, sorry but I was working online during the last hours :)

Be aware that "code view" link isn't updated. I'll do it tomorrow.

My test blog > http://enbaires.com/blog1/

John

Posted 3 years ago #
klhrevolution
Member

Okay, I took a look at that blog with the seo friendly url and that looks a lot more cleaner. As it is now, I already posted my htaccess rule for shortening and this is what it looks like

http://www.greenvilleroad.info/index.php?option=viewEntry&filename=00018
http://www.greenvilleroad.info/articles/viewEntry-00018.htm

Mine is a bit different than yours. I'll wait and see what prit decides on cause I'm no php coder.

Thanks!

Posted 3 years ago #
Prit
Pritlogger

Even if there are ? and & in an URL, search engines do crawl and index such sites. Just as an experiment, I tried searching for some keywords on Barry's blog (http://puppylinux.com/blog) and found that it showed up on both google, yahoo and msn. Here are the keywords I searched with:
"woof ubuntu repos"

Barry's blog uses PPLOG (which is very similar to Pritlog except that it is in Perl), and it does not use clean urls.

My conclusion from this - whether we make the URL's clean as discussed on this thread or not, doesnt make a difference for search engines.

The other question is about ranking so that our entry shows up possibly on the first page or first few pages on a search result. For this, even if we make clean urls as discussed on this thread, it may not help. It will help, if the title, and url will contain the keyword. This can be possible only by creating clean urls of the form:
http://domain.com/general/my-experience-with-pritlog

If/when the title of the post can appear on the url itself and as a title (html title) of the page itself, this would definitely help in seo ranking. But, I personally dont think the kind of url cleaning we are trying to achieve on this thread might help improve the seo ranking.

Your opinions?

Posted 3 years ago #
klhrevolution
Member

Anyone know how to prevent editEntry & deleteEntry from showing up search queries ?

Posted 3 years ago #
Prit
Pritlogger
Hey Ken .. with the next version of Pritlog that I am working on, the edit and delete entries will show only if someone is logged on. So the search engine spiders will not index it.

For now, you could add a robots.txt file entry like. Only the good search engines like yahoo, msn, google and some others respect the robots.txt file.
```
User-agent: *
Disallow: /editEntry/
Disallow: /deleteEntry/
```
Posted 3 years ago #
klhrevolution
Member

So, I was checking out lxer.com today to see the gnu/linux related headlines and I see this: http://www.h-online.com/open/Search-engines-fight-duplication-with-canonical--/news/112666

Very interesting and relevant to this topic. Thanks again prit!

Posted 3 years ago #
Prit
Pritlogger

Thanks Ken. I will read the article. I am sure it will help.

Posted 3 years ago #
klhrevolution
Member

Well, the dang google is still showing editEntry & other stuff. I'm going to change it to where it reads as:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /editEntry
Disallow: /deleteEntry

Rather than:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /editEntry/
Disallow: /deleteEntry/

A minor change but I'll see if that does the trick or not. May be useful for others is why I post!

Posted 3 years ago #
Prit
Pritlogger

Thanks Ken.

Anyway, from Pritlog 0.8, you would not have this problem because these links will be visible only to logged in users and hence the search engine bots will not be able to index these.

Posted 3 years ago #

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