Thread: Creating SEF URL's

Hello,

I need some suggestions from you guys!

I use a system, which generates search engine friendly URL's in this format:

mysite.com/news/this is the sef url

Do you think that this URL format will have less value than:

mysite.com/news/this-is-the-sef-url

Please let me know your opinion! Thanks in advance!

Hi Proweb. I use this format for SEF urls on my Joomla sites, usually managed with sh404SEF.

mysite.com/news/this-is-the-sef-url

Although if you ever use Kunena forum, I found their SEF urls are much better with the default Joomla SEF enabled and exclude Kunena URL's from being processed by sh404SEF.

I don't think the other way has any value at all. Leaving spaces in the urls would create urlencoding issues wouldn't it ?. I've always tried to avoid having spaces in generated urls to avoid that, looks kinda terrible.

URLs cannot contain spaces..

http://www.w3schools.com/TAGS/ref_urlencode.asp

Also my J! sites that use a .html extension with SEF urls seem to do better than my sites that don't have any {.html|.php} page extension.

Thanks for your tips. I have been using core SEF on my sites, without any extension and worked well for me. I will try out this URL extension stuff on a new sites. I don't used this feature because I don't believe in higher ranking with .html or .php extensions, but will give it a try.

Actually, I'm modifying the search component of Joomla which does not has search engine friendly URLs. When I do a search, I always get something like this:

?searchword=keyword1+keyword2&ordering=newest&sear chphrase=all

Can sh404SEF fix this problem as well or it's working only for content and other extensions? Did you tried it out?

Is this URL formatting better?

/search?searchword=key1+key2
instead using this one:
/search/key1 key2

I don't think that mysite.com/news/this is the sef url is SE friendly due the spaces as Mike-XS hinted at.

If you have a .htaccess file with a LAMP server you can do something like:

Code:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^news/(.*) http://mysite.com/search?searchword=$1 [L]

This would pass a search term containing dashes so your php code would need to replace them with + symbols or spaces etc.

Andy, thanks for the tip! This is working.

I have only on problem. When the search query has 2 or more words, the URL looks like this:

mysite.com/news/key1%2Bkey2

Actually the system use '+' to separate the keywords. Is there any possibility to change this using .htaccess?

Thanks again for your help!

I think that in .htaccess you can only substitute one URL pattern for another one. After that, you have to implement some code in the destination script.

So I think that you have to have some PHP code to replace the URL encoded + characters with something like: $url = str_replace('+', '-', $url);

or $url = str_replace('%2B', '-', $url);

Not sure.

I did not managed to make working everything with htaccess, so I had to change the codes. Now it's running well and creating SEF urls. The rewrite rule has helped me a lot.

Thanks Andy for help!

@proweb, this was mentioned by Mike-XS, but I don't think you understood.

This:

Code:

mysite.com/news/this is the sef url

is NOT a search engine friendly URL. Spaces are never allowed in a URL. A space is not a valid URL character. Unless a hexadecimal %20 is substituted in place of the space, the URL won't even work on a Unix or Linux server.

It sounds like you may be working with a Microsoft server. MS servers allow you to do several things that are not valid on the web. You could never do that on a Linux or Unix server. Spaces are not allowed in URLs, file names or directory names. Using URL encoding will work to eliminate the spaces, but it makes a sloppy-looking URL.

The standard search engine friendly URL would be

Code:

mysite.com/news/this-is-the-sef-url/

TopDogger, thanks for your replay. I understood that spaces between keywords in URL are not valid. I thought that this can be indexed by search engines. Anyway I have fixed it and I'm very happy