Pages URL Flexibility & SEO + Usability Questions

[esquire]

While I understand your frustration, I doubt that is likely to change. They provide the default URL structure. The rest is up to the modding community.

The kind of modifications you want would be devastating for most existing IPC sites in SEO, assuming that 0 conflicts arise in urls due to custom record slug use.  Thus, the default does rather need to accommodate that, and having the option to change it, if present at all, should be a power setting.

You would not believe the number of admins that dink around with their URL structure then come crying when their rank drops like a stone. The average end-user does need considered as well as upgraders. I do believe IPS has done that, and what you see is the result.

Thanks for the acknowledgement. Agree and appreciate exactly what you're saying. I've got a dilemma... I spent numerous hours trying to deal with IP.C SEO issues I felt were critical (with many thanks to you) before deciding it was definitely not the way to go for my sites. So... do I consider moving large content sites to Pages software that reflects compromises to account for prior design issues?  I would have preferred they made Pages 100% optimized for SEO, optimized for moving over lots of existing content in common accepted formats, with a major focus on seeing whether they could get 301 redirection to work reliably on prior sites. (Theoretically, this should be able to be accomplished - but yes, it's just theory and valid concerns.) And will my custom URL structure work with current and future plugins? Decisions.... Will see about the URL hook and let you know.

You also describe a current paradox with Pages. The average end user has no idea what dinking around with URL structure can mean. They will probably think that reorganizing Pages categories and subcategories for their Wiki and content databases is no different than doing the same in the Forum. And given the comments here in the forum, it would lead these people to believe there are no practical consequences. They will find out.