Advice on Url Mapping and Search Engine Article Indexing

box · 2008-01-24 00:03:23

If I have an article published on a site and it’s title is “Dogs and Cats”, the default permanent link seems to be generated with the form:

domain/article/n/Dogs-and-Cats

Google picks these up and I’m wondering what if I want to change the title of an article? The link will get broken and no longer work. The client browser would then get redirected to my site’s url not found page, which is at least a customized not found page.

Can I map such changed urls somewhere, so that if I change the article’s title , I can specify the new url in some kind of mapping configuration so users will get redirected to the page they’re interested in?

Perhaps this is outside the scope of Textpattern and it can be done with some sort of Apache configuration more appropriately? If Textpattern has some way to do it, that would be nice though.

Is it possible to stop Google and other SEs from indexing individual article pages this way?
For instance can’t Textpattern be made to produce less friendly article urls such as:

domain/article/n or domain/articleId=n or something like that

Then I could change the article title and not worry about breaking the way SEs index my article pages.

I’m aware of the permalink tag, can this be used to get the effect I want?

I found an Asian prostitution site that is just an amazing piece of content management. The developer has solved all the cm issues I need, I contacted the guy and asked him what was behind it. He said he uses WordPress. I would like to mention the url here, but I think your moderators would object, because this site is very hard. Perhaps in in the interests of furthering our collective knowledge?….perhaps not.

Anyway this guy’s articles just get indexed by the SEs with a generic form of url like domain/article/n as I’ve described above. He changes his article content all the time. I’d like to know how to do this in Textpattern. I don’t like WordPress.

Also it would be neat to be able to have article permanent links come out as intra page links with a #, because on one of my sites all the articles are on the front page. Is this possible?

jm · 2008-01-24 00:19:47

Well if you want to stop indexing, then use a robots.txt. If you want to redirect to a new article, add this in your htacces:

Redirect 301 /article/55/dogs-and-cats http://example.com/article/new-article-title

Mary · 2008-01-24 00:21:13

If you change the title of an article, the url_title remains the same unless you change/empty it manually.

els · 2008-01-24 16:58:03

box wrote:

For instance can’t Textpattern be made to produce less friendly article urls such as:

domain/article/n or domain/articleId=n or something like that

gbp_permanent_links or use messy.

box · 2008-01-24 22:21:34

Thanks very much for all this advice.

I think I’m definately sticking with Textpattern for my next few sites, with such a helpful forum.

The .htaccess redirect 301 tip is excellent news, thanks for that, that’s an excellent workaround for one of my problems.

Regarding clean urls vs. messy urls, it appears there are 2 choices for permlinks according to the Wiki docs for clean urls, hypenated and camel case

I suppose the utimate control would be to have some clean and some messy urls and the SEs only index what you have.

This plugin looks pretty good too, may be I can mix messy and different permlink clean url styles with that.

If I change the title of an article, I’ve just checked as someone said, it appears not to break the previous permlink. How do I deliberately change the permlink though to make it match the new title?

I suppose if I delete the whole article then create it again with the new title might do it

els · 2008-01-24 22:38:10

box wrote:

If I change the title of an article, I’ve just checked as someone said, it appears not to break the previous permlink. How do I deliberately change the permlink though to make it match the new title?

Under ‘Advanced options’ in the ‘Write’ screen is a field ‘URL-only title’. It doesn’t change when you change the article’s title, only when you empty this field and save the article with the new title, a new URL-only title is created. Or you can enter whatever you want for it.

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#1 2008-01-24 00:03:23

Advice on Url Mapping and Search Engine Article Indexing

#2 2008-01-24 00:19:47

Re: Advice on Url Mapping and Search Engine Article Indexing

#3 2008-01-24 00:21:13

Re: Advice on Url Mapping and Search Engine Article Indexing

#4 2008-01-24 16:58:03

Re: Advice on Url Mapping and Search Engine Article Indexing

#5 2008-01-24 22:21:34

Re: Advice on Url Mapping and Search Engine Article Indexing

#6 2008-01-24 22:38:10

Re: Advice on Url Mapping and Search Engine Article Indexing

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