I'm deciding whether or not to make the slug mandatory in order to view a submission.
Right now either of these works to get to a submission:
domain.com/category/id/1/slug-title-here
domain.com/category/id/1/slug-blah-foo-bar
domain.com/category/id/1/
All go to the same submission.
You can also change the slug to whatever you want and it'll still work as it just checks for the category, id, and submission # (in the second example).
I'm wondering if this is the proper way to do this? From an SEO standpoint should I be doing it like this? And if not, what should I be doing to users who request the URL without the slug?
The slug in the url can serve three purposes:
It can act as a content key when there is no id (you have an id,so this one doesn't apply)
When just a url is posted as a link to your site, it can let users know what content to expect because they see it in the url
It can be used by search engines as a ranking signal (Google does not use url words as a ranking signal very much right now as far as I can tell)
Slugs can create problems:
Urls are longer, harder to type, harder to remember, and often get truncated
It can lead to multiple urls for the same page and SEO problems with content duplication
I am personally not a fan of using a slug unless it can be made the content key because of the additional issues it creates. That being said, there are several ways to handle the duplicate content problems.
Do nothing and let search engines sort out duplicate content
They seem to be doing better at this all the time, but I wouldn't recommend it.
Use the canonical tag
When a user visits any of the urls for the content, they should get a canonical tag like such:
<link rel="canonical" href="http://domain.com/category/id/1/slug-title-here" />
As far as Google is concerned, the canonical tag can even exist on the canonical url itself, pointing to itself. Bing has advised against self referential canonical tags though. For more information on canonical tags see: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html
Use 301 redirects
Before canonical tags, the only way to avoid duplicate content would be with 301 redirects. Your software can examine the url path, and compare the slug to the correct slug. If they don't match, it can issue a 301 redirect that will send the user to the canonical url with the correct slug. The stack overflow software works this way.
so these urls:
domain.com/category/id/1/slug-blah-foo-bar
domain.com/category/id/1/
would redirect to
domain.com/category/id/1/slug-title-here
which would be the only url that would actually have the content.
Assuming you're not ever going to change a page's slug, I'd just set up domain.com/category/id/1/ to do a 301 redirect (permanent) to domain.com/category/id/1/slug-title-here, and any time someone enters a slug which is incorrect for that article (domain.com/category/id/1/slug-title-here-oops-this-is-wrong), also 301 them to the correct address.
That way you're saying to the search engines "I don't have duplicate content, look, this is a permanent redirect" so it doesn't harm your SEO, and you're being useful to the user in always taking them to the correct "friendly url" page.
I suggest you to make a rel=canonical meta tag.
This prevents do a redirect each time considering someone can link your page with infinte variant like this:
domain.com/category/id/1/?fakeparam=1
From a SEO standpoint, as long as your only ever linking to one version of those URL's, it should be fine as the other URL's won't even be picked up by the search engine (as nowhere links to them).
If however you are linking to all 3, then it could hurt your rankings (as it'll be considered duplicate content).
I personally wouldn't make the slug required, but I would make sure that (internally) all links would point to a URL including the slug.
Related
I've been reading about redirection, and how it can affect (or not if done properly) SEO.
I'm changing my website's content platform from Drupal to a PHP custom made code.
In my current site I have two links that point to the same link like this:
.../node/123
.../my-node-title
Mainly because Drupal allows you to create a custom-made links, so every article has a default one (node/123) and the custom-made one (/my-node-title).
My question is about what to do in order to prevent losing any SEO that each link may have.
In the new website all articles are structured like this: content.php?id=123
I've stored in the database the custom-made link of every article.
Instead of doing a 301 redirect I'm redirecting all links that do not exist to be redirected to redirect.php page to process the request. There I take the string from the link, look for it in the database and redirect the user.
The process is like this:
in .htaccess file:
RewriteRule ^.*$ ./redirect.php
In redirect.php:
I grab the $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] and using explode() I get the last part of the link (ie. my-node-title), look for it in the database and grab the ID of the article (ie. 123) and save it in a $link variable.
Then I use header() function and do the redirect: header('Location: '.$link);
So, people still click on .../my-node-title but when the article loads at the navigation bar appears /content.php?id=123
I would like to know your comments about this solution. I know that with SEO there are not fixed rules, or certainty in anything, but I would like to know if what am I doing is acceptable. Thanks!
Your SEO strategy should not only focus on discoverability of your pages, but also take proper UX into account. Having a user follow /some-link/, and then landing on /index.php?page_id=123 may disorient them.
As for saving your ranking, a 302 redirect (which is what the 'Location' header does in PHP), will not affect PageRank, according to Google. I have no information on how it might adversely affect other ranking signals. You would probably do good to specify a canonical URL for all distinct links that point to the same resource.
Also, be aware that your algorithm won't work, if query parameters are present. You might also want to look at properly handling optional trailing slashes.
Ideally, in my opinion, you would want to provide consistent URLs to the outside world, without any need for redirection. Your URL handling would then internally resolve them to their respective resources, serving the canonical URL on every page load.
I have a PHP website where every page can be accessed either by page ID or by page name:
http://domain/page_id=ID
http://domain/page=NAME
The problem is that Google treats this as duplicated content. What is the best practice to avoid duplicate content in the case? Will 303 redirect will be better than entirely avoiding two different URLs to lead to the same page?
According to Google:
In the world of content management and online shopping systems, it's
common for the same content to be accessed through multiple URLs.
Therefore,
Indicate the preferred URL with the rel="canonical" link element
Suppose you want
http://blog.example.com/dresses/green-dresses-are-awesome/ to be the
preferred URL, even though a variety of URLs can access this content.
You can indicate this to search engines as follows:
Mark up the canonical page and any other variants with a
rel="canonical" link element. Add a element with the attribute
rel="canonical" to the section of these pages:
This indicates the preferred URL to use to access the green dress
post, so that the search results will be more likely to show users
that URL structure. (Note: We attempt to respect this, but cannot
guarantee this in all cases.)
So, all you need to do is to add the canonical link element to the <head> section of your pages with absolute paths.
I'm building a little database driven PHP CMS. I'm trying to figure the best strategy for this case scenario:
I have a URL like this:
http://www.my.com/news/cool-slug
Someone saves or share this URL (or it gets indexed by Google).
Now I realize that the slug is not quite right and change it to:
http://www.my.com/news/coolest-slug
Google and users who previously saved the URL will hit a 404 error.
Is this the best and common solution (showing the 404) or should I keep a table in my database with all the history of the generated URLs mapped to the ID of the page and redirect with a 301 header?
Will this be an unnecessary load on my system (this table can get lots of records...)?
One very common solution used by many sites (including StackOverflow as far as I can tell) is to include the ID in the URL. The slug is just here for SEO/beauty/whatever, but is not used to identify the page.
Example: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/27877901/strategy-for-permanent-links-not-wordpress
As long as you have the right ID, it doesn't matter what slug you use. The site will just detect that the slug is wrong, and generate a redirect to the right one. For example, the following URL is valid:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/27877901/old-slug
If for some reason you do not want the ID in the URL, then either you forbid changes (many news site do that: you can notice that sometimes the slug and the title of a news article do not match), or your have to live with the occasional 404 when the slug changes. I've never seen any website having a system to keep the slug history, as it can be quite annoying (you won't be able to "reuse" a slug for example).
I have a Joomla! website with rewrite rules activated. My article URl is mysite.com/category/ID-alias.html. The only thing which is important (from this url) is the id, because when I can access the article with any text at "category" and any text at "alias".
Let's show a concrete example:
My article URL: mysite.com/flowers/15-begonia.html
I can access the same by changing category name and alias directly from url:
mysite.com/tralala/15-anything.html //Shows the same article as above.
Is this SEO? If one of my visitors want to destroy my website SEO, can he open my articles with different addresses (like above) and Google will say that articles are duplicated? Does Google knows when a visitor goes to a webpage to which link doesn't exists anywhere?
Hope my question is clear.
Thanks.
Google do a good job of deciding which is the "right" version of a page - it is worth watching this video to see how they handle this situation:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQZY7EmjbMA
Since these wrong URLs should not be linked to from anywhere, it is unlikely they will be indexed by mistake.
However, should they index the wrong version of a page, setting a sitemap with the right one will usually fix it.
A visitor could not harm your SEO with this knowledge. The worst they could do would be to provide good links to a non-indexed page, which would cause the wrong URL to be indexed. However, it would then be very easy for you to 301 redirect that page and turn their attempts at harm into an SEO benefit.
I personally think Joomla should look into adding the canonical tag, but if you want that currently, you must use an extension like this:
http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/site-management/seo-a-metadata/url-canonicalization-/25795
(NB I have never used this extension so cannot guarantee its quality - the reviews are good, though)
Links on the website I am making currently look like this:
http://www.example.net/blogs/151/This-is-a-title-in-a-url
My php system pulls out the id (151 say) and uses that to pull to content from my database. The text afterwards is effectively ignored (much like stackoverflow uses).
Now my problem is that this creates duplicate titles that Google will sometimes index and I lose SEO as a result:
http://www.example.net/blogs/151/This-is
http://www.example.net/blogs/151/
What is the best way to make it so that google and other search engines only see the correct full link so that I don't end up with duplicates and get the best ranking possible?
EDIT: I notice that with stackoverflow site that you get dynamically redirected to another page? How do they do that?
Pick a URI to be canonical.
When you get a request for http://example.com/123/anything then, instead of ignoring the anything, compare it to the canonical URI.
If it doesn't match, issue a 301 Moved Permanently redirect.
A less optimal approach would be to specify the canonical URI in the page instead of redirecting:
<link rel="canonical" href="http://example.com/123/anything"/>