Post Permalinks URL Change

Example thread: Pretty permalink URL thingies (SEO) - FinalGear.com Forums

I want the post number (ex: #1) in the upper right to be changed from this:

http://forums.finalgear.com/the-forums/pretty-permalink-url-thingies-search-engine-optimization-24656/page-2/#post609722

to this:

http://forums.finalgear.com/the-forums/pretty-permalink-url-thingies-search-engine-optimization-24656/post609722/

(my post permalink structure as set in the vBSEO control panel)

How would I go about doing that? I want it this way so that it's posts-per-page independent and people can share those post permalinks between each other without ending up on different pages.

What I mean is if person A with 25 PPP copies the link for post #30, it'd have a "page-2" in it, while if person B with 50 PPP copied that link, it'd be page 1.

Follow?

Anyone?

Hello,

that would cause duplicate content issue, since the same page will be accessible with many different URLs:
topicX/post1/
topicX/post2/
topicX/post3/
etc.

That's why vBSEO rewrites vBulletin's "showthread.php?p=X" URLs into "main thread URL", to consolidate content and improve search engines indexing.

Thanks for the reply!

Originally Posted by Oleg Ignatiuk

that would cause duplicate content issue,

How so? No content is directly available at those URLs as they redirect to a particular page of the thread (i.e. the first URL I posted).

And if it is bad for SEO, why are these URLs used elsewhere? For example, the "go to last post" on the right column of my forum homepage is using this URL, as are search results, etc. etc.

(It's in the vBSEO options under "'Go To Post in Thread' Redirect URL Format".)

Heck, it's even being used right on these forums:

http://www.vbseo.com/f28/post-permalinks-url-change-20112-post123606/

It is only used in case if direct link cannot be created without additional db query.

I hate to seem like a pest, but what drawback would it have to use a redirect URL as the permalink to posts? Google wouldn't index it due to a 301 header, so problem solved, right?

Because as it is now, the http://site.com/thread-name-1234/page-2/#post56789 URL structure is worthless for many users on my forums as the link goes to the completely wrong page for them.

Or am I missing something?

Since permalinks are used to "bookmark" posts and link to them from external sites, you will have inbound links from external sites that are not direct URLs and will not bring you so much value SEO-wise.

Oh, I didn't think of that.

However, say I didn't mind the SEO hit (although I've found few people outside of my forums reference specific posts) and wanted those URLs used anyway? Is that possible?

I'm not sure what I want now after your post (I'll have to talk it over with the users of my forums and look how many of them use a non-standard posts-per-page), so I'm just seeing if it's even possible at this point.

That has been suggested in post-id instead of page-id in the permalink urls as well recently.

I see the rationale here, and it does make sense. You are basically requesting to have the permalink link be replaced by the 'Go to post' link.

I'd really hate to loose the "direct link power" that permalinks create in their current state. Remember, it's clear that Search Engines *understand* that a link to a URL plus an anchor is in essence a link to the URL itself, however, it's not clear the "link love" they give to the landing URL after a 301 redirect.

The real problem here is that even if we would implement it as a 'Go to post' redirect, 99.9 % of your users would 1) click the link first, 2) get redirected to the URL+Anchor and 3) copy the resulting address bar URL to share it elsewhere on the net.

*Unless* it's implemented as an explicit dialog that displays the suggested URL used to link back to each post (like in this forum - click on a post permalink), I believe we'd be running around in circles with 301 redirects with no real benefit.

I'm not sure how many users would want permalinks implemented like this on vBSEO?

Originally Posted by Juan Muriente

I see the rationale here, and it does make sense. You are basically requesting to have the permalink link be replaced by the 'Go to post' link.

Exactly.

Originally Posted by Juan Muriente

I'd really hate to loose the "direct link power" that permalinks create in their current state. Remember, it's clear that Search Engines *understand* that a link to a URL plus an anchor is in essence a link to the URL itself, however, it's not clear the "link love" they give to the landing URL after a 301 redirect.

Yeah, for sure.

However, based on linkbacks, Googling for my site, etc. etc., I find 99.9% of links to my forums are to the whole thread or sometimes a specific page of the thread. Very rarely do I see links to specific posts. I don't know if it's guests with inexperience with my forums and how to link to a specific post or what though.

By far the majority of the uses for the links are internal, at least on my forums. People wanting to reference other posts without quoting them.


Perhaps a compromise solution (as an option of course) is page/HTML anchors shown to guests if they want to use them and "go to post" popups for logged in users or something.

Or actually, perhaps two links or something. One for like "link to this post on another site" with the page/anchor link and one like "link to this post here on the forums" with a popup having this in it:

Code:

[post]12345[/post]

I totally understand the benefits and the disadvantages of the methods.

My only problem is keeping the functionality of the permalinks no matter if previous posts are deleted from the thread or not.

I display 5 posts for page. Let's say i shared the link of the post #11 (3rd page) in another thread. Post #10 was deleted for some reason. Page number will change and the permalink won't take people to the correct page.

I guess i should live with this.

I was thinking about this again and just happened to come up with a solution: Javascript! It's not quite perfect, but it's a solution and one that doesn't affect SEO.

Here's the bit of JS that I stuck in my SHOWTHREAD <head> that once the DOM is ready, it grabs the current anchor, looks for it in the page, and if it's not found, redirects to the post.

Code:

<script type="text/javascript">
/* <![CDATA[ */

	// This checks the page for the requested post anchor and if it's not there, it redirects
	function viperCheckForPost() {

		// Get the anchor
		var anchor = window.location.hash.substr(1);

		// If the anchor is a post anchor but there's nothing with that ID in the page, redirect
		if ( anchor && "post" == anchor.substr(0,4) && null == document.getElementById(anchor) ) {
			window.top.location = 'showthread.php?p=' + anchor.substr(4);
		}
	}

	YAHOO.util.Event.onDOMReady(viperCheckForPost);

/* ]]> */
</script>

There's two minor problems though which may or may not be able to be fixed (I dunno, my JS skills aren't that great):

1. The back button gets broken as it'll just redirect again.
2. There's a small chance that it could redirect forever if it's on the correct page for the user but for some reason the post ID is missing from the HTML. Dunno how that could happen though (some crazy custom theme? I dunno).

I've had a report or two about this causing a little trouble, so I added a confirmation dialog before it redirects to the user can opt to redirect or not.

You can see it in action by clicking this link: Generic Test Thread #1 - FinalGear.com Forums

A box should pop up and if you click okay, it should redirect to a different thread (although it's designed mainly for redirecting to a different page).

I have a similar problem

once my permanent link structure looked like

/1573474-post3646.html

and got redirected to the right place in the right thread ... someone (I think it was from 3.0.0 to 3.1.0)

Now I've permalinks with PAGENUMBERS in it ... this doesn't work anymore for users with different posts per page ... is their a real fix for it? German support promised it will be fixed in 3.2.0 but it didn't ...