Forums / Cotonti / Core Labs / Archive / Proposed SEO URL System

What I propose that cotonti would use is a following system that would probably suit most of our needs as developers:

1.) subdomain-based URLs (best effect, hardest to implement)

A lot of cheap hosts dont allow you to set up wildcard DNS (what you need to have for this to work) and setting this up on a dedicated host is a pain (bind, dns, refreshing), but the results you get on most search engines are amazing - the biggest joke is that all search engines still see subdomains as separate sites (and this will probably never change due to google's own blogger system) so you get to fill up all 10 of the results if you're doing other stuff correctly :)

The URLs would look like hxxp://category_code.site.com/alias.html - going directly to hxxp://category_code.site.com/ gives you the list view and hxxp://forum.site.com/ gives you the forums.

2.) subdomain-based URLs for users instead of categories

Same thing just that it would connect to the user (via userbyname plugin, hopefully in the core), not the list view. Very useful for social networking membership sites like deviantart.com

The URLs would look like hxxp://user.site.com

3.) Worky-on-all-servers URL (worst, default)

I wont get much into this...

4.) html files without directories

We've seen plugs like this around even in the LDU days. Either a preg replace or a code modification that would turn all php files into html files. Usually also accompanied with an ID somewhere in the URL.

The URLs would look like hxxp://www.site.com/p3-safe-title-of-page.html or The URLs would look like hxxp://www.site.com/t3-some-topic.html

If we were to use alias only we could of course sack the p3 and t3 parts.

5.) alias files under cetegories

While it's also a very nice and logical way to design your site this also applies to "seo siloing" as they now started to call this technique. The directory is the list view and the files inside that directory are pages, hopefully aliases to make things as straightforward as possible.

hxxp://www.site.com/category/alias.html

6.) Alias directories under categories

Same thing but with directories: hxxp://www.site.com/category/alias/ (with or without the slash)

-----------------------------------------

These ways would be picked with a radio button in your admin panel so you would get to choose what kind of system you like best. Then a htaccess file would either be autogenerated or you would manually copy the version that applies to you.

The URLs will be stored in the code as functions so one simple switch will do all the work.

The current code needs the following plugins for optimum work:

- redirector (redirects site.com/category/alias.html to subdomain variant, will be released here)
- category checker (checks if the alias is indeed in this category -> redirects /wrongcategory/alias.html to /rightcategory/alias.html with a 301 header)

What I also propose is to have the alias generated at creation of the page automatically (javascript code already created for this and will be shared) so we can stop using IDs to call pages completely.

Ideas welcome.