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"
Related
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).
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
I've got a web app which heavily uses AngularJS / AJAX and I'd like it to be crawlable by Google and other search engines. My understanding is that I need to do something special to make it work, as described here: https://developers.google.com/webmasters/ajax-crawling
Unfortunately, that looks quite nasty and I'd rather not introduce the hash tags. What I'd like to do is to serve a static page to Googlebot (based on the User-Agent), either directly or by sending it a 302 redirect. That way, the web app can be the same, and the whole Googlebot workaround is nicely isolated until it is no longer necessary.
My worry is that Google may mistakenly assume that I'm trying to trick Googlebot, while my goal is to help it. What do you guys think about this approach, and what would you recommend?
Recently I come upon this excellent post from yearofmoo, explaining in details how to make your Angular app SEO friendly. In essence, when bots see an uri with a hash tag they will know it's an ajaxed page and will try to reach the same uri by replacing '#!' in your uri with '?_escaped_fragment_='. This alternative uri instructs bots that they should expect to find a definitive static version of the page they were accessing.
Of course, to achieve this you'd have to introduce hash tags into your uris. I don't see why are you trying to avoid them. Isn't gmail using hash tags?
Yeah unfortunately, if you want to be indexed - you have to adhere to the scheme :( If your running a ruby app - there's a gem that implements the crawling scheme for any rack app....
gem install google_ajax_crawler
writeup of how to use it is at http://thecodeabode.blogspot.com.au/2013/03/backbonejs-and-seo-google-ajax-crawling.html, source code at https://github.com/benkitzelman/google-ajax-crawler
Have a look at these links and it will give you a good direction:
Set up your own Prerender service using Prerender.io open source code:
https://prerender.io/
Use a different existing service such as BromBone, Seo.js or SEO4AJAX:
http://www.brombone.com/
http://getseojs.com/
http://www.seo4ajax.com/
Create your own service for rendering and serving snapshots to search engines. Read this article. It will give you the big picture:
http://scotch.io/tutorials/javascript/angularjs-seo-with-prerender-io
As of May 2014 GoogleBot now executes JavaScript. Check WebmasterTools to see how Google sees your site.
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.no/2014/05/understanding-web-pages-better.html
Edit: Note that this does not mean other crawlers (Bing, Facebook, etc.) will execute Javascript. You may still need to take additional steps to ensure that these crawlers can see your site.
Not long ago I came across this website: http://www.danasoft.com/
This websites provides dynamically updating signatures which are pretty cool in my opinion.
There is just one thing that I don't get and would really like to know how to do.
Here's a direct link to an image on the website: http://www.danasoft.com/vipersig.jpg Try refreshing. Notice it changes? How do I achieve that? How do I have a direct link to a file like www.mypage.com/thing.jpeg output different images each time?
Basically, the URL is not actually retrieving the file directly each time, but rather the server is intercepting that URL and serving a (possibly random) image from a larger set of images. Depending on whether the server is running Apache, IIS, etc, the implementation could vary... This could also probably be achieved with the MVC routing engine by defining a custom route handler for URLs ending in '.jpg', but I'm not actually sure.
EDIT:
See this discussion for more detail on the MVC implementation.
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.