I am trying to decode and encode Joomla urls but Joomla doesn't seem to have a consistent API for that (how it looks). The main problem comes in when another SEO plugin is installed and the operation is performed as background process (ie: not whilst rendering in a browser through Joomla).
The other big problem is that users copy and paste SEO urls of the own site directly into the content.
Does anyone knows a solution for this ? Supporting all sorts of SEO plugins individually is a total no-go and rather impossible.
I actually thought its the Job of the CMS to guarantee on a API level that SEO urls can be decoded and encoded without knowing the plugins, but no. I also had a look in some plugins and indeed, plugins do
handle code for other plugins whilst it shouldn't be, coz.
Well,
thanks
You can't. JRoute won't work reliably in the administrator, I even tried hacking it, it's a no-go.
Moveover sh404 (one of the leading SEF extensions) does a curl call to the frontend in order to get the paths right. You can find in their code a commented attempt to route in the backend.
Are you are trying to parse content when it's saved, find SEF urls and replace with their non-sef equivalents? If you create a simple component to handle this in the frontend (just get what you need from xmap), then you can query the frontend from the backend with curl/wget and possibly achieve this with a decent rate of success: but I wouldn't expect this to work 100% (sometimes parameters are added by components, or the order of parameters is different from call to call, and the router.php in extensions can be very fragile or even plain wrong).
Related
I have a third-party WP plugin which, although no longer updated, still works fine - and for which I've not been able to find an alternative.
It's 'Zajax' - which ajax-loads internal pages... thus enabling a streaming-radio audio-player to be fixed to the viewport-base, with continuous play throughout page-changes.
However, it appears to require absolute urls - on root-relative urls it reloads the whole page (and thus stops continuous-play).
This is a hindrance, because I normally use root-relative urls - and hence sometimes forget to ensure that all internal urls are absolute rather than root-relative.
I want to modify, so that it'll work with root-relative urls - but don't know enough to do this.
Actually using root-relative URL-s is not good idea, but if it is comfortable for you, then use small jQuery snippet which may help you with the problem.
jQuery("a").each(function(){
if (jQuery(this).attr("href").indexOf("http")==-1){
jQuery(this).attr("href","https://yourwebsiteurl.com/"+jQuery(this).attr("href"));
}
});
You can put this code to footer area of your website, it will detect root-related links and convert them to normal links. (without changing anything at your backend, of course)
I've got a very unique situation that I don't believe any of the other topics here can relate.
I have a ecommerce module that is dynamically loaded / embedded into third party sites, no iframe straight JSON to web client into content. I have no access to these third part sites at all, other then my javascript file being loaded from their page and dynamically generating the content.
I'm aware of the #! method, but that's no good here, my JS does generate "urls" within the embedded platform, but they're fake and for the address bar only, and I don't believe google crawlers can reach this far.
So my question is, is there a meta that we can set to point outside the url to i.e. back to my server with static crawlable content. I.e. pointing the canonical to my server... but again I don't think that would work.
If you implement #! then you have to make sure the url your embedded in supports the fragment parameter versions, which you probably can't. It's server side stuff.
You probably can't influence the canonical tag of the page either. It again has to be done server side. Any meta tag you set via JavaScript will not be seen by a bot.
Disqus solved the problem by providing an API so the embedding websites could get there comments server side and render then in plain html. WordPress has a plugin to do this. Disqus are also one of the few systems that Google has worked out how to crawl their AJAX pages.
Some plugins request people to also include a plain link with the JavaScript. Be careful with this as you may break Google Guidelines if you do it wrong. But you may be able to integrate the plain link with your plugin so that it directs bots and users to a crawlable version of the content.
Look into Google's crawlable ajax standard (and why it's a bad idea) and canonical URLs.
Now you can actually do this. A complete guide and examples can be found here: https://github.com/kubrickology/Logical-escaped_fragment
So Google takes:
http://www.mysite.com/mypage/#!pageState
and converts it to:
http://www.mysite.com/mypage/?_escaped_fragment_=pageState
...So... Would be it fair game to redirect that with a 301 status to something like:
http://www.mysite.com/mypage/pagestate/
and then return an HTML snapshot?
My thought is if you have an existing html structure, and you just want to add ajax as a progressive enhancement, this would be a fair way to do it, if Google just skipped over _escaped_fragment_ and indexed the redirected URL. Then your ajax links are configured by javascript, and underneath them are the regular links that go to your regular site structure.
So then when a user comes in on a static url (ie http://www.mysite.com/mypage/pagestate/ ), the first link he clicks takes him to the ajax interface if he has javascript, then it's all ajax.
On a side note does anyone know if Yahoo/MSN onboard with this 'spec' (loosely used)? I can't seem to find anything that says for sure.
If you redirect the "?_escaped_fragment_" URL it will likely result in the final URL being indexed (which might result in a suboptimal user experience, depending on how you have your site setup). There might be a reason to do it like that, but it's hard to say in general.
As far as I know, other search engines are not yet following the AJAX-crawling proposal.
You've pretty much got it. I recently did some tests and experimented with sites like Twitter (which uses #!) to see how they handle this. From what I can tell they handle it like you're describing.
If this is your primary URL
http://www.mysite.com/mypage/#!pageState
Google/Facebook will go to
http://www.mysite.com/mypage/?_escaped_fragment_=pageState
You can setup a server-side 301 redirect to a prettier URL, perhaps something like
http://www.mysite.com/mypage/pagestate/
On these HTML snapshot pages you can add a client-side redirect to send most people back to the dynamic version of the page. This ensures most people share the dynamic URL. For example, if you try to go to http://twitter.com/brettdewoody it'll redirect you to the dynamic (https://twitter.com/#!/brettdewoody) version of the page.
To answer your last question, both Google and Facebook use the _escaped_fragment_ method right now.
We're coming from GWT projects and because of problems with SEO not liking GWT for our next project we're going to move clear of GWT (mainly because seo is a high priority for this next project). In choosing a new framework, I'm looking at Wicket and liking what I've seen so far. I've only done a few tutorials, but in looking at the war layout (from these tutorials) it looks like most of the html pages are in the WEB-INF folder.
It this going to cause problems for SEO and search engines crawling through the sites files?
Ideally, I'd like to use Wicket with some AJAX and deploy to Google App Engine.
It does not matter if your .jsps (or whatever) are stored in /WEB-INF. It just means they cannot be accessed directly by going to http://webapp/path/to/jsp.
For SEO think about:
Meaningful URLs and link text (i.e. URLs should be similar to expected search engine queries)
Crawlable pages (make sure all your content can be reached by a non-JS enabled bot... i.e. don't make content only available through AJAX, for instance). A sitemap might help
Look into Wicket's Bookmarkable page links and UrlCodingStrategies for a very powerful combination to use in SEO. Basicly all your links and parameters can be encoded as/a/static/url, regardless of (changing) implementation on the backend.
if you project SEO is really important than you might reconsider using a lot of ajax since crawler wont execute javascript they are not gonna read all the return of your ajax calls... that being said the SEO quality of your site is not really based on the framework you will be using ... jsut always think about img alts, links, meta, title, h1 ... in every pages and you should be fine ... also always try to post links to your site on other websites to gain visibility and get importance for crawlers
When I look at Amazon.com and I see their URL for pages, it does not have .htm, .html or .php at the end of the URL.
It is like:
http://www.amazon.com/books-used-books-textbooks/b/ref=topnav_storetab_b?ie=UTF8&node=283155
Why and how? What kind of extension is that?
Your browser doesn't care about the extension of the file, only the content type that the server reports. (Well, unless you use IE because at Microsoft they think they know more about what you're serving up than you do). If your server reports that the content being served up is Content-Type: text/html, then your browser is supposed to treat it like it's HTML no matter what the file name is.
Typically, it's implemented using a URL rewriting scheme of some description. The basic notion is that the web should be moving to addressing resources with proper URIs, not classic old URLs which leak implementation detail, and which are vulnerable to future changes as a result.
A thorough discussion of the topic can be found in Tim Berners-Lee's article Cool URIs Don't Change, which argues in favour of reducing the irrelevant cruft in URIs as a means of helping to avoid the problems that occur when implementations do change, and when resources do move to a different URL. The article itself contains good general advice on planning out a URI scheme, and is well worth a read.
More specifically than most of these answers:
Web content doesn't use the file extension to determine what kind of file is being served (unless you're Internet Explorer). Instead, they use the Content-type HTTP header, which is sent down the wire before the content of the image, HTML page, download, or whatever. For example:
Content-type: text/html
denotes that the page you are viewing should be interpreted as HTML, and
Content-type: image/png
denotes that the page is a PNG image.
Web servers often use the file extension if the file is served directly from disk to determine what Content-type to assign, but web applications can also generate pages with any Content-type they like in response to a request. No matter the filename's structure or extension, so long as the actual content of the page matches with the declared Content-type, the data renders as intended.
For websites that use Apache, they are probably using mod_rewrite that enables them to rewrite URLS (and make them more user and SEO friendly)
You can read more here http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/mod/mod_rewrite.html
and here http://www.sitepoint.com/article/apache-mod_rewrite-examples/
EDIT: There are rewriting modules for IIS as well.
Traditionally the file extension represents the file that is being served.
For example
http://someserver/somepath/image.jpg
Later that same approach was used to allow a script process the parameter
http://somerverser/somepath/script.php?param=1234&other=7890
In this case the file was a php script that process the "request" and presented a dinamically created file.
Nowadays, the applications are much more complex than that ( namely amazon that you metioned )
Then there is no a single script that handles the request ( but a much more complex app wit several files/methods/functions/object etc ) , and the url is more like the entry point for a web application ( it may have an script behind but that another thing ) so now web apps like amazon, and yes stackoverflow don't show an file in the URL but anything comming is processed by the app in the server side.
websites urls without file extension?
Here I questions represents the webapp and 322747 the parameter
I hope this little explanation helps you to understand better all the other answers.
Well how about a having an index.html file in the directory and then you type the path into the browser? I see that my Firefox and IE7 both put the trailing slash in automatically, I don't have to type it. This is more suited to people like me that do not think every single url on earth should invoke php, perl, cgi and 10,000 other applications just in order to sent a few kilobytes of data.
A lot of people are using an more "RESTful" type architecture... or at least, REST-looking URLs.
This site (StackOverflow) dosn't show a file extension... it's using ASP.NET MVC.
Depending on the settings of your server you can use (or not) any extension you want. You could even set extensions to be ".JamesRocks" but it won't be very helpful :)
Anyways just in case you're new to web programming all that gibberish on the end there are arguments to a GET operation, and not the page's extension.
A number of posts have mentioned this, and I'll weigh in. It absolutely is a URL rewriting system, and a number of platforms have ways to implement this.
I've worked for a few larger ecommerce sites, and it is now a very important part of the web presence, and offers a number of advantages.
I would recommend taking the technology you want to work with, and researching samples of the URL rewriting mechanism for that platform. For .NET, for example, there google 'asp.net url rewriting' or use an add-on framework like MVC, which does this functionality out of the box.
In Django (a web application framework for python), you design the URLs yourself, independent of any file name, or even any path on the server for that matter.
You just say something like "I want /news/<number>/ urls to be handled by this function"