I'm validating one of my web pages and its throwing up errors as below :
& did not start a character reference. (& probably should have been escaped as &.)
This is because on my page I am linking to internal webpages which has &'s in the URL as below:
www.example.com/test.php?param1=1¶m2=2
My question is that if I change the URLs in the a hrefs to include & as below:
www.example.com/test.php?param1=1¶m2=2
Will Google and other search engines treat the 2 URLs above as separate pages or will they treat them both as the one below:
www.example.com/test.php?param1=1¶m2=2
I dont want to loose my search engine rankings.
There is no reason to assume that search engines would knowingly ignore how HTML works.
Take, for example, this hyperlink:
…
The URL is not http://example.com/test.php?param1=1¶m2=2!
It’s just the way how the URL http://example.com/test.php?param1=1¶m2=2 is stored in attributes in an HTML document.
So when a conforming consumer comes across this hyperlink, it never visits http://example.com/test.php?param1=1¶m2=2.
Related
I'm creating a dynamic website which is displaying many products. There are also filters like price (from - to), year (from-to) etc. I need to put # symbol before the filter parameters in URL because of Googlebot indexing. But I have no idea how to do it and found no documentation on the internet.
I think it could be done with AJAX script but I don't know where to start.
The question is:
How do I insert a # hash symbol before parameters in URL?
I've got this:
http://domain.com/pd/?rps=100&a=2001
and I need to make it look like
http://domain.com/pd/#rps=100&a=2001
Why do you want to replace the "?" with "#". For well optimised url to seo, you can leave them unchanged. You can also use Google Webmaster Tool to declare your url parameters. Here is another resource for you to optimize your url :Faceted navigation
Say I have a TitleCase directory name, but call an item within that directory using a lowercase url.
Does that have any effect or impact?
For example, does the server need to do a redirect from the incorrect lettercase to the correct lettercase?
Example
A file here: /PlugIns/CMSPages/Images/my-image.jpg
Called with: /plugins/cmspages/images/my-image.jpg
The routing engine isn't case sensitive.
One thing to be wary of, if you are referring to page urls - Google treats lowercase and uppercase urls as different pages, so you want to make use of rel="canonical" to ensure Google and other search engines know it is one page, no matter whether the url is upper or lowercase.
I'm designing a permalink system and I just noticed that Twitter and Hipmunk both prefix their permalinks with #!. I was wondering why this is, and if the exclamation point in particular is there for a reason. Wouldn't #/ work just as well, since they're no doubt using a framework that lets them redirect queries to certain templates with a regex URL parser?
http://www.hipmunk.com/#!BOS.SEA,Dec15.Jan02
http://twitter.com/#!/dozba
My only guess is it's because browsers use # to link to an anchor element. Is this why the exclamation point is appended?
This is done to make an "AJAX" page crawlable [by google] for indexing -- It does not affect the other well-defined semantics of the fragment identifier at all!
See Making AJAX Applications Crawlable: Getting Started
Briefly, the solution works as follows: the crawler finds a pretty AJAX URL (that is, a URL containing a #! hash fragment). It then requests the content for this URL from your server in a slightly modified form. Your web server returns the content in the form of an HTML snapshot, which is then processed by the crawler. The search results will show the original URL.
I am sure other search-engines are also following this lead/protocol.
Happy coding.
Also, It is actually perfectly valid, at least per HTML5, to have an element with an ID of "!foo" so the
reasoning in the post is invalid. See the article "The id attribute just got more classy":
HTML5 gets rid of the additional restrictions on the id attribute. The only requirements left — apart from being unique in the document — are that the value must contain at least one character (can’t be empty), and that it can’t contain any space characters.
My guess is that both pages use this in their JavaScript to differ between # (a link to an anchor) and their custom #! which loads some additional content using Ajax.
In that case pretty much everything else would work after the # sign.
I am using ColdFusion 9.
I am creating a brand new site that uses three templates. The first template is the home page, where users are prompted to select a brand or a specific model. The second template is where the user can view all of the models of the selected brand. The third template shows all of the specific information on a specific model.
A long time ago... I would make the URLs like this:
.com/Index.cfm // home page
.com/Brands.cfm?BrandID=123 // specific brand page
.com/Models.cfm?ModelID=123 // specific model page
Now, for SEO purposes and for easy reading, I might want my URLs to look like this:
.com/? // home page
.com/?Brand=Worthington
.com/?Model=Worthington&Model=TX193A
Or, I might want my URLs to look like this:
.com/? // home
.com/?Worthington // specific brand
.com/?Worthington/TX193A // specific model
My question is, are there really any SEO benefits or easy reading or security benefits to either naming convention?
Is there a best URL naming convention to use?
Is there a real benefit to having a URL like this?
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7113295/sql-should-i-use-a-junction-table-or-not
Use URLs that make sense for your users. If you use sensible URLs which humans understand, it'll work with search engines too.
i.e. Don't do SEO, do HO. Human Optimisation. Optimise your pages for the users of your page and in doing so you'll make Google (and others) happy.
Do NOT stuff keywords into URLs unless it helps the people your site is for.
To decide what your URL should look like, you need to understand what the parts of a URL are for.
So, given this URL: http://domain.com/whatever/you/like/here?q=search_terms#page-frament.
It breaks down like this:
http
what protocol is used to deliver the page
:
divides protocol from rest of url
//domain.com
indicates what server to load
/whatever/you/like/here
Between the domain and the ? should indicate which page to load.
?
divides query string from rest of url
q=search_terms
Between the ? and the # can be used for a dynamic search query or setting.
#
divides page fragment from rest of the url
page-frament
Between the # and the end of line indicates which part of the page to focus on.
If your system setup lets you, a system like this is probably the most human friendly:
domain.com
domain.com/Worthington
domain.com/Worthington/TX193A
However, sometimes a unique ID is needed to ensure there is no ambiguity (with SO, there might be multiple questions with the same title, thus why ID is included, whilst the question is included because it's easier for humans that way).
Since all models must belong to a brand, you don't need both ID numbers though, so you can use something like this:
domain.com
domain.com/123/Worthington
domain.com/456/Worthington/TX193A
(where 123 is the brand number, and 456 is the model number)
You only need extra things (like /questions/ or /index.cfm or /brand.cfm or whatever) if you are unable to disambiguate different pages without them.
Remember: this part of the URL identifies the page - it needs to be possible to identify a single page with a single URL - to put it another way, every page should have a unique URL, and every unique URL should be a different page. (Excluding the query string and page fragment parts.)
Again, using the SO example - there are more than just questions here, there are users and tags and so on too. so they couldn't just do stackoverflow.com/7275745/question-title because it's not clearly distinct from stackoverflow.com/651924/evik-james - which they solve by inserting /questions and /users into each of those to make it obvious what each one is.
Ultimately, the best URL system to use depends on what pages your site has and who the people using your site are - you need to consider these and come up with a suitable solution. Simpler URLs are better, but too much simplicity may cause confusion.
Hopefully this all makes sense?
Here is an answer based on what I know about SEO and what we have implemented:
The first thing that get searched and considered is your domain name, and thus picking something related to your domain name is very important
URL with query string has lower priority than the one that doesn't. The reason is that query string is associated with dynamic content that could change over time. The search engine might also deprioritize those with query string fearing that it might be used for SPAM and diluting the result of SEO itself
As for using the URL such as
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7113295/sql-should-i-use-a-junction-table-or-not
As the search engine looks at both the domain and the path, having the question in the path will help the Search Engine and elevate the question as a more relevant page when someone typing part of the question in the search engine.
I am not an SEO expert, but the company I work for has a dedicated dept to managing the SEO of our site. They much prefer the params to be in the URI, rather than in the query string, and I'm sure they prefer this for a reason (not simply to make the web team's job slightly trickier... all though there could be an element of that ;-)
That said, the bulk of what they concern themselves with is the content within and composition of the page. The domain name and URL are insignificant compared to having good, relevant content in a well defined structure.
If an extra character (like a period, comma or a bracket or even alphabets) gets accidentally added to URL on the stackoverflow.com domain, a 404 error page is not thrown. Instead, URLs self correct themselves & the user is led to the relevant webpage.
For instance, the extra 4 letters I added to the end of a valid SO URL to demonstrate this would be automatically removed when you access the below URL -
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/194812/list-of-freely-available-programming-booksasdf
I guess this has something to do with ASP.NET MVC Routing. How is this feature implemented?
Well, this is quite simple to explain I guess, even without knowing the code behind it:
The text is just candy for search engines and people reading the URL:
This URL will work as well, with the complete text removed!
The only part really important is the question ID that's also embedded in the "path".
This is because EVERYTHING after http://stackoverflow.com/questions/194812 is ignored. It is just there to make the link, if posted somewhere, if more speaking.
Internally the URL is mapped to a handler, e.g., by a rewrite, that transforms into something like: http://stackoverflow.com/questions.php?id=194812 (just an example, don't know the correct internal URL)
This also makes the URL search engine friendly, besides being more readable to humans.