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On a site I'm working on there will be about 7 different directories. I use DirectoryIndex in my .htaccess to point to index.php, so you can go to site.com/menu/ or site.com/menu/index.php and get the same content and so on for the other 6 directories.
I know duplicate content is supposed to be bad. Will this cause any SEO issues, or will search engines be smart enough to understand it's a DirectoryIndex and only index the result once?
Using DirectoryIndex is a very common practice. If done right it isn't a problem. However it can introduce duplicate content.
Pick one to be "canonical". You probably want to use site.com/menu/ as canononical. Who wants to see "index.php" in urls?
Never link to the non-canonical version. Instead of href="index.php" use href="./" Users shouln't ever see "index.php" in the url by clicking around the site.
If you do that, Googlebot will probably never even know what the real name of the file is and there will be no problem. If Googlebot does start crawling urls with "default.php" in them, then use the canonical tag to tell Google which is the correct url that it should pay attention to.
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Is there any consensus on the best practice of path vs page url structures (for simple, relatively static sites), in terms of usability and SEO?
e.g.
http://mysite.com/about.html
vs
http://mysite.com/about/
Where the about folder contains index.html
It would seem in terms of usability, esp. sharing and linking, that the path approach is much better (predicated upon the approach of only sharing the url up to the slash after the folder, and not including the index.html), albeit more complex in terms of organization - and that the page approach is better for SEO.
Also I've never quite understood the difference between
http://mysite.com/about/
and
http://mysite.com/about/index.html
Will the first always redirect to the second, therefore slowing things down? And when sharing the first type of url, should/must one always include the slash?
Thanks
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Good morning #all,
I've created a tiny cms system where users can create their own websites. Every user gets a subdomain like mywebsite.mycmsystem.com. That works really well. The websites are generated dinamically through a php script, but got static html urls throug mod_rewrite. So an URL has mywebsite.mycmsystem.com/home_1234.html instead of mywebsite.mycmsystem.com/page.php?id=1234
I thought that would be better for search engines. Now the problem is that google won't really crawl through all the websites from the users. Is there a way to tell google where to find all the websites or something like this? I searched for hours in the web, but couldn't find something really useful.
Best regards,
Lukas
The numbers in the URL are not causing your indexing issues. URLs with numbers are indexed and crawled just fine.
The best way to tell the search engines about your pages is an XML sitemap.
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If I register a domain abc.com, but point via a redirect to another domain's subfolder like def.com/abc, what's the effect on SEO? Will Google index both abc.com and def.com/abc and display them for keyword "abc"?
Is there any way to avoid this or pomote abc.com so it displays more prominently than def.com/abc?
What's the best practice in this scenario?
Thanks for the help.
I'll refer to Google's official SEO guide. Here's a link to the full guide.
Provide one version of a URL to
reach a document
To prevent users from linking to one version of a URL and others linking to a different version (this
could split the reputation of that content between the URLs), focus on using and referring to one URL
in the structure and internal linking of your pages. If you do find that people are accessing the same
content through multiple URLs, setting up a 301 redirect from non-preferred URLs to the dominant
URL is a good solution for this. You may also use canonical URL or use the rel="canonical" link element
if you cannot redirect.
Since Google relies on links to your pages, you're going to have an issue if people link to one URL versus another. So in short, yes, that will probably have an effect on your optimization.
Edit: Google's algorithm may be smart enough to know your redirect and follow it when indexing your pages. Probably your best outcome will be to not do the redirect and instead point the domain at your content. The second best will be to use the HTTP 301 status code.
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I've searched but I'm having trouble finding a conclusive conclusion. I would also be interested if this has any impact on SEO.
I would suggest not to use.
Reasons:
Google requests server with non encoded URL, even if link in the page is containing encoded (%27) version. This behavior may not be same for different browsers & other search engines. Also, Google displays non encoded version in the search results.
You can read link posted by Rahul Tripathi (http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/webmasters/aKVMfwL6WgE) about the impact in search ranking with/without apostrophe.
If you still want to use apostrophe:
Ensure that your web server handles encoded & non encoded URL's well.
Keep a track of your web-server logs for 404 errors due to improper usage of apostrophe by robots.
By the way currently we are running an experiment to record the behaviour of various search engines, while crawling pages with unsafe characters. You can find about it at http://app.searchenabler.com/experiments/.
One example test which we performed.
http://app.searchenabler.com/experiments/unsafe/%20!$&'()*+,-.:;%3C=%3E#[/]%5E_%60%7B%7C%7D~
(You can try to open above URL in different browser's & check the behaviour)
Also you can see how google cached one such URL at
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:jkWRWOTPZXwJ:app.searchenabler.com/experiments/unsafe/%2520!%24%26'()*%2B,-.:%3B%253C%3D%253E%40%5B%255C%5D%255E_%2560%257B%257C%257D~+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk
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My (rails 3.1) site currently does routing for objects using ids like so: /object/show/:id
For seo and url prettification, I'd like to change them to /object/show/:id/:title or something similar.
I still want to use ids to do the db lookup for performance and simplicity, so the addition of :title would be purely cosmetic.
Given this, would keeping the a tag hrefs on my site pointing to /object/show/:id and then doing a 301 permanent redirect to my new url scheme be an seo-friendly way of getting object titles into my urls? Are there any drawbacks to pointing my hrefs at the old scheme? Many are hardcoded to the original scheme, so we'd like to avoid the chore of inserting titles across the codebase if it's unnecessary. Thanks!
If you leave the hrefs to the old URLs then all the links will redirect.
This means all visitors will get a slightly slower experience and Google will leak some of the PageRank that gets passed between links.
Avoid it if possible.
Ryan Bates has a Screencast covering that subject when your change would only have to be cosmetic. Plus your hard coded links will still work.
Simply change the to_param method in your model.
def to_param
"#{id}-#{permalink}"
end
Model#find will still work that way.