Seo links BAD STRUCTURE

[Petri Maatta]

Hey,

I bought the IP.CONTENT plugin but I'm not that impressed yet:

How can I change the non-seo friendly URLS to seo friendly urls?

Current bad version:

http://mywebsite.com/articles.html/_/a-guide-to-further-education/

Want to have it like this:

http://mywebsite.com/articles/a-guide-to-further-education

Thank you for your help in advance,

Bye

[Alan]

You can rename "articles.html" to "articles" in your Admin CP under Other Apps -> Content -> Page Manager. Edit the "articles.html" page and on Step 1, rename it in the page URL setting to "articles".

For the underscore in the URL, that's a database marker that IP.Content needs so cannot be removed. You can rename it to something else however by creating a file on your FTP called "constants.php" (if it doesn't already exist) - this file should be in the same place is your conf_global.php file. Add the following to it:

<?php
define( 'DATABASE_FURL_MARKER', 'new-marker' );

Replace 'new-marker' with whatever you want the new database marker to be. If you already have a constants.php file then just add the second line to it.

[opentype]

How can I change the non-seo friendly URLS to seo friendly urls?

Current bad version:

http://mywebsite.com/articles.html/_/a-guide-to-further-education/

Want to have it like this:

http://mywebsite.com/articles/a-guide-to-further-education

How do you figure the top one is “non-seo friendly”?

[GreenLinks]

Will IPB 4 still require that database marker ?

That is most important question for us as we are holding all our IP.Content related development on hold just because of this database marker requirement.

[Petri Maatta]

How do you figure the top one is “non-seo friendly”?

Because .html says that it's a page. If I write it like this: books/url-title-name.html google know that 'books' is most likely a category and url-title-name.html is a page.

Everything in the universe has a correct structure. In addition to this I have tested 100's of seo landingpages since 2004. The badly formed URLS never achieve the same result as a correctly made one.

I hope that clears it up,

[Petri Maatta]

You can rename "articles.html" to "articles" in your Admin CP under Other Apps -> Content -> Page Manager. Edit the "articles.html" page and on Step 1, rename it in the page URL setting to "articles".

For the underscore in the URL, that's a database marker that IP.Content needs so cannot be removed. You can rename it to something else however by creating a file on your FTP called "constants.php" (if it doesn't already exist) - this file should be in the same place is your conf_global.php file. Add the following to it:

<?php
define( 'DATABASE_FURL_MARKER', 'new-marker' );

Replace 'new-marker' with whatever you want the new database marker to be. If you already have a constants.php file then just add the second line to it.

Thanks. Will test it asap.

[opentype]

Because .html says that it's a page.

So? That doesn't mean that this “page” can't be understood as a “category”.

Here is a Google result from an IP.Content article of my site:

Judging from the breadcrumb trail and its links, Google understands the categories of my site without any problems, even though there is a .htm in it. And I can't think of any reason why this shouldn't work. An URL like asite.com/CATEGORY also reflects a “page”—the homepage found in this folder.

If you have a link to something like a Google knowledge articles that explains that the standard IP.Content URL structure is bad practice, I would be interested to read it. But I wouldn't accuse IPS of using bad urls just because of my personal assumptions and expectations.

[.Ian]

If you do replace the /_/ then I would suggest adding

RedirectMatch 301 ^/(.*)/_/(.*)   http://www.YOURDOMAIN.co.uk/$1/YOUR_REPLACEMENT_FURL/$2

to your .htaccess file.

This should then redirect any traffic from your old structure to the new one.

You would need to add in your domain and your new database furl in order for it to work.

I

[Amged Osman]

wait what? google knows its a "book" from the link? i wonder why they invented schema.org then ....

That's entriely not true

you can define books/articles/movies etc via http://schema.org/ itemscop and itemprop .... regardless of the link structure ..

my website have only been online for 2 months ... i use default marker /_/ yet my website appers on seconds page of google search ( I just posted the article about IPB 3 couple of days ago )

Well structured formatted data is what counts .. not links.

[Mikey B]

Will IPB 4 still require that database marker ?

That is most important question for us as we are holding all our IP.Content related development on hold just because of this database marker requirement.

We haven't released any info on IP.Content at this time but I'm sure the developers will be covering it in future blog entries. :)

[.Ian]

Well structured formatted data is what counts .. not links.

Agree 100% - data has always been and will always remain king.

I am sure that it makes no difference with using the _ or not. The only reason why people say to use - instead of _ in page names is because _ takes an extra key press.. I am not aware that _ in any URL will affect listings in any search engine. If I am wrong, I await correction :)

Aesthetically I do agree that say c looks better than _ to the human eye, but a search engine couldn't give a .....