RE: CMS Solutions (Friendly URL's)
Mod_rewrite is your best friend, if you've got Apache. Someone has mentioned a port for IIS in the form of an ISAPI filter, I belive, but I don't know. It's such a snap to set up redirections, whether they're simple (turn a script name into a fuseaction, for example), or complex, like macromedia.com's /go/ setup or based on request variable (user agent, ip, etc.). Best of all, you can opt for external or internal rewrites. Macromedia.com uses external rewrites, which do the same thing as a CFLOCATION, basically, including changing the browser's address bar. Internal rewrites let you not expose the "real" url, keeping it ever hidden behind the public url, though you do have to be careful with relative links (like for images). Cheers, barneyb > -Original Message- > From: Mauricio Giraldo [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Sent: Wednesday, January 07, 2004 1:29 PM > To: CF-Talk > Subject: Re:CMS Solutions (Friendly URL's) > > >While we're on the subject - does anyone know of any good > >resources/mailings lists - I've been out of the SEO loop for a while > > I second that... Any references to mapping dynamic urls to > static ones? > [Todays Threads] [This Message] [Subscription] [Fast Unsubscribe] [User Settings]
RE: CMS Solutions (Friendly URL's)
Mauricio wrote: >why would marketing be the ones to decide if it is >>mymag.com/issues/2003/november/19 instead of mymag.com/2004/11/19 >or something else? do marketers do url usability? Maybe. Imho the developer should build tools that lets a smart user take advantage of such specialized knowledge; not get in its way. i.e. http://foo.com/bar/ as opposed to http://foo.com/english/cms/2004/marketing/woo/hoo Let the user or their agents do the SEO, unless of course the developer is contracted to do same. Whether shallow directory trees containing lots of files and more descriptive, structured filenames are better than deep heirarchical structures with fewer files per folder and shorter names is an ancient and endless debate, so I ain't going there :-). Matt Robertson [EMAIL PROTECTED] MSB Designs, Inc. http://mysecretbase.com [Todays Threads] [This Message] [Subscription] [Fast Unsubscribe] [User Settings]
RE: CMS Solutions (Friendly URL's)
While we're on the subject - does anyone know of any good resources/mailings lists - I've been out of the SEO loop for a while Thanks Kola -Original Message- From: Matt Robertson [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: 02 January 2004 21:02 To: CF-Talk Subject: Re: CMS Solutions (Friendly URL's) Good points all, John. I was indeed taking a very simplistic view of the length of the string. And something I haven't given a lot of thought to was the depth of the folders. Very interesting. >p.s. it would also help if you repeat that >info in the tag as well as in a near the top of the page. By and large we're doing that, but we've played around with alternatives on non-critical pages. It *seems* -- and take this single-source anecdotal experience for what its worth -- that keywords in the filename alone are the single largest determining factor in elevating placement. Maybe a top-10 ranking on that alone. Add in the meta title and you're a solid candidate for #1. Make it the title of the page as well (we use a named style rather than tying a style to , but thats a *great* idea) and, so far, we're hitting #1 consistently. And as I'm sure you know this won't happen for hotly contested keywords. "ColdFusion", for example. The trick is of course to pick something attainable, useful to the client and searched-upon. Your points on SE marketing are right on. I think the marketing side gets short shrift from the tech side, but marketing is very often the reason a commercial site exists in the first place. -- --- Matt Robertson, [EMAIL PROTECTED] MSB Designs, Inc. http://mysecretbase.com --- -- _ [Todays Threads] [This Message] [Subscription] [Fast Unsubscribe] [User Settings]
Re: CMS Solutions (Friendly URL's)
Good points all, John. I was indeed taking a very simplistic view of the length of the string. And something I haven't given a lot of thought to was the depth of the folders. Very interesting. >p.s. it would also help if you repeat that >info in the tag as well as in a near the top of the page. By and large we're doing that, but we've played around with alternatives on non-critical pages. It *seems* -- and take this single-source anecdotal experience for what its worth -- that keywords in the filename alone are the single largest determining factor in elevating placement. Maybe a top-10 ranking on that alone. Add in the meta title and you're a solid candidate for #1. Make it the title of the page as well (we use a named style rather than tying a style to , but thats a *great* idea) and, so far, we're hitting #1 consistently. And as I'm sure you know this won't happen for hotly contested keywords. "ColdFusion", for example. The trick is of course to pick something attainable, useful to the client and searched-upon. Your points on SE marketing are right on. I think the marketing side gets short shrift from the tech side, but marketing is very often the reason a commercial site exists in the first place. -- --- Matt Robertson, [EMAIL PROTECTED] MSB Designs, Inc. http://mysecretbase.com --- -- [Todays Threads] [This Message] [Subscription] [Fast Unsubscribe] [User Settings]
Re: CMS Solutions (Friendly URL's)
Matt, that is *not* a "long" URL at all. It's not about the total number of characters, only about how the engines parse them. The sections to be looked at are: 1) the 'depth': how many apparent sub-dirs down from the root (this is part of the 'long URL' definition) 2) the 'name': actual name of the resource requested, if any (such as in your example) 3) the query string: length of query string and how any vars are to be interpreted (this is the other part of the 'long URL' definition) In your example you had a long file name in the URL but that is it. You weren't deep, you didn't have a query string, and you report the name of the resource as corresponding in context to the content of the resource once spidered. Congrats! You are doing exactly what the search engine spiders like to get high positioning. (p.s. it would also help if you repeat that info in the tag as well as in a near the top of the page. the 'depth' and query string are more problematic. It's been clearly stated by search engine companies that they do look at the depth of an URL, and in fact most won't bother giving any additional weight to URLs with depths greater than 2 or 3, simply because of the 'techie' solution a few years ago of addressing the query string problems by creating what they called "search engine safe" by substituting slashes for the ampersands and equal signs on the query string. That is, since a "deep" URL often represents what is just a regular URL with a long query string, they just ignore the effect altogether. You still get *in* the engine when spidered, but you dont rank nearly as high as if you had a 'shallow' URL query string: This has been the most uneven set of solutions addressed by the search engines. Some of them parse it completely nowadays. Most of the older ones don't do anything with it. The smarter search engines, like Google, actually have some sense of certain words to look for that indicate a 'dynamic' site (to most CF'ers, a good example would be Fusebox apps -- Google knows that "fuseaction" is a common way of distinguishing what could otherwise be a resource name) But this doesn't always help because sometimes it is a combination of query string params that actually distinguish one resource from another: method=getProductDetails&ProductID=123 is different than method=getProductDetails&ProductID=456 whereas method=HomePage&DayOfYear=2 is likely not very differnt from method=HomePage&DayOfYear=3 versus method=AboutUs&CFID=123456789&CFTOKEN=987654321 where the CFID/CFTOKEN represent nothing at all about the site since they are only a stateholder And anyway the spiders have to be programmed to care (or not) about such differences (such as in the case of the 'fuseaction', etc). All in all, dynamic URLS should be mapped to static ones, and this mapping should be be done by your marketing department One last comment, since this always seems to get lost in a techie discussion about search engines. Placement in search engines is about marketing, not about technology. And because it's about marketing, it will often look to techies like "oh that's just a trick to get high placement" (the implication being that if they learn all the tricks then they will be search engine marketers too). I know we all agree that the bar for calling oneself a marketer is extraordinarily low; nevertheless, we should keep in mind that just as we would laugh at marketers who presumed to explain proper use of CFCs, so too do marketers laugh at us when we attempt to perform their job. It's good for us to be aware that when we're tweaking our sites for search engine placement that we are wearing a different hat than we normally do and that we should be aware that we are likely out of our realm of competent experience -- and to therefore tread lightly. - Original Message - From: "Matt Robertson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "CF-Talk" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Friday, January 02, 2004 12:32 PM Subject: RE: CMS Solutions (Friendly URL's) > Joseph Flanigan wrote: > >Your statement is interesting. Do you have some references that support > > >your statement? > > >>One needs short relevant file > >>names in a short shallow URL corresponding to actual content in the > >>document to make the biggest impact in the search engine rankings. > > We could analyze this forever, but lets ask whats a long url? The part > about the relevant keywords is critical of course; that's common SEO > advice. Take this url for example: > > http://tamsenmunger.com/Nicolas_Trudgian_The_Checkertail_Clan.cfm > > Google 'Checkertail' only. #1 there and at Yahoo (as it also is for > other
RE: CMS Solutions (Friendly URL's)
Joseph Flanigan wrote: >Your statement is interesting. Do you have some references that support >your statement? >>One needs short relevant file >>names in a short shallow URL corresponding to actual content in the >>document to make the biggest impact in the search engine rankings. We could analyze this forever, but lets ask whats a long url? The part about the relevant keywords is critical of course; that's common SEO advice. Take this url for example: http://tamsenmunger.com/Nicolas_Trudgian_The_Checkertail_Clan.cfm Google 'Checkertail' only. #1 there and at Yahoo (as it also is for other relevant keyword combos). The page (and the site) is about 5 weeks old. I'd call this a long url, but we wanted both author and product name in there. I've got similar results on 1, 2 and 3-word combos where all seem to handle the 'long' url's just fine on this engine. Repeat: on this engine (Google/Froogle/Yahoo). Go to MSN and, at present at least, these pages aren't ranked at all. Their urls for this site are outdated by months so maybe this will change. I can live with free #1's on just these engines, though. Matt Robertson [EMAIL PROTECTED] MSB Designs, Inc. http://mysecretbase.com [Todays Threads] [This Message] [Subscription] [Fast Unsubscribe] [User Settings]
RE: CMS Solutions (Friendly URL's)
> One needs short relevant file >names in a short shallow URL corresponding to actual content in the >document to make the biggest impact in the search engine rankings. John: Your statement is interesting. Do you have some references that support your statement? Joseph > >-- -- Switch_box www.Switch-box.org MediaFirm, Inc. PO Box 2171 Loveland, CO 80539 [EMAIL PROTECTED] [Todays Threads] [This Message] [Subscription] [Fast Unsubscribe] [User Settings]
RE: CMS Solutions (Friendly URL's)
Just an FYI, I somehow accidently cut out the email I was replying to. This was in response to: "For one, It provides to much insight into how the application works." from Dwayne Cole. [Todays Threads] [This Message] [Subscription] [Fast Unsubscribe] [User Settings]
RE: CMS Solutions (Friendly URL's)
This will not matter to a properly built application though. Any time you use a URL application your code should handle the lack of, or the modification of, the value passed in the query string. While I accept the "search engine" argument, I do not accept this one. [Todays Threads] [This Message] [Subscription] [Fast Unsubscribe] [User Settings]
Re: CMS Solutions (Friendly URL's)
> I have seen too many website owners who get hung up on the statements below that they loose sight of what their webpage >is all about. > I'll keep that one in mind the next time I meet with our client, Google. :) [Todays Threads] [This Message] [Subscription] [Fast Unsubscribe] [User Settings]
RE: CMS Solutions (Friendly URL's)
Cool! Thanks for the tips! Peter Tilbrook ColdFusion Applications Developer ColdGen Internet Solutions Manager, ACT and Region ColdFusion Users Group - http://www.actcfug.com 4/73 Tharwa Road Queanbeyan, NSW, 2620 AUSTRALIA Telephone: +61-2-6284-2727 Mobile: +61-0439-401-823 E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] \¯\/¯/ |¯|)¯) /¯/\¯\ \¯\/¯/ /_/\_\ |_|)_) \_\/_/ /_/\_\ RULES -Original Message- From: Matt Robertson [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, 1 January 2004 11:02 AM To: CF-Talk Subject: Re: CMS Solutions (Friendly URL's) I heard a talk given by a nice lady from Google. One of her basic points: "Don't try too hard". As Paul says, content is king. But recently some big things happened with Google's formula revision, and thats where CF comes in. This is relative to CF in that we can design dynamic pages to have keyword-laden, purely static-appearing names that, coupled to content and intelligent page title choice, seem to be thehot ticket. Almost as soon as I started using fake static page names, mid-November) the results have been stunning. Very often #1 rankings for targeted keyword combos. Google this: hellcat fury #1 duxford eagles #1 (even beats theduxfordeagles.com) moorcroft nostalgia #1, #2 (mfr & product name) lynn chase bunny #1 #2 (mfr & product name) This is from my own site, launched in December: coldfusion programmers tools #1 unicode in coldfusion #1 client variables coldfusion #8 (tough category; still got listed) I'm not submitting any of thsi stuff. Its all coming from crawls. -- --- Matt Robertson, [EMAIL PROTECTED] MSB Designs, Inc. http://mysecretbase.com --- -- [Todays Threads] [This Message] [Subscription] [Fast Unsubscribe] [User Settings]
Re: CMS Solutions (Friendly URL's)
I heard a talk given by a nice lady from Google. One of her basic points: "Don't try too hard". As Paul says, content is king. But recently some big things happened with Google's formula revision, and thats where CF comes in. This is relative to CF in that we can design dynamic pages to have keyword-laden, purely static-appearing names that, coupled to content and intelligent page title choice, seem to be thehot ticket. Almost as soon as I started using fake static page names, mid-November) the results have been stunning. Very often #1 rankings for targeted keyword combos. Google this: hellcat fury #1 duxford eagles #1 (even beats theduxfordeagles.com) moorcroft nostalgia #1, #2 (mfr & product name) lynn chase bunny #1 #2 (mfr & product name) This is from my own site, launched in December: coldfusion programmers tools #1 unicode in coldfusion #1 client variables coldfusion #8 (tough category; still got listed) I'm not submitting any of thsi stuff. Its all coming from crawls. -- --- Matt Robertson, [EMAIL PROTECTED] MSB Designs, Inc. http://mysecretbase.com --- -- [Todays Threads] [This Message] [Subscription] [Fast Unsubscribe] [User Settings]
RE: CMS Solutions (Friendly URL's)
For one, It provides to much insight into how the application works. >Just out of curiosity, but why is the URL "awful"? Sure, it's not something >you can memorize, but outside of that, who cares how crazy it looks. The >typical user will just bookmark it and not even notice what the URL says. > > > [Todays Threads] [This Message] [Subscription] [Fast Unsubscribe] [User Settings]
Re: CMS Solutions (Friendly URL's)
Though this is true and needs to be addressed when building a site, you should always keep a few things in mind, 1) Quality of content on your site (clear content for actual human eyes who are reading). This should outweigh anything else on your website. 2) Though there are many things that are relevant to search engines, they all have various weights and some things are more important than others. More effort should be put on keyworded content and relavant keywords than on how many levels a page goes deep ... I have seen too many website owners who get hung up on the statements below that they loose sight of what their webpage is all about. If you can accomplish all aspects of quality content, relative keywords and search engine friendly keywords great ... but if you can't pick away at whats important first.. and do your best at whats left over. Paul Giesenhagen QuillDesign - Original Message - From: John Quarto-vonTivadar To: CF-Talk Sent: Friday, January 02, 2004 4:33 AM Subject: RE: CMS Solutions (Friendly URL's) It's not the friendliness to users which is significant but rather the friendliness to search engines coupled with how they weight various aspects of a given resource on the web. Short URLs are given a much higher weight than long(er) URLs, (presuming the content is otherwise the same). Ditto again for the size of the query string on the URL. And relevancy of the name of the file in the URL, if any, also is given high weight *if* that also corresponds to in-document context. This is why the so-called 'search engine safe" URLs don't really do much for most sites if all they do is substitute slashes for ampersands and equals signs; most search engines will start decrementing relevancy weight once the URL is more than 2-3 levels deep. One needs short relevant file names in a short shallow URL corresponding to actual content in the document to make the biggest impact in the search engine rankings. -Original Message- From: Raymond Camden [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, December 31, 2003 4:33 PM To: CF-Talk Subject: RE: CMS Solutions (Friendly URL's) Just out of curiosity, but why is the URL "awful"? Sure, it's not something you can memorize, but outside of that, who cares how crazy it looks. The typical user will just bookmark it and not even notice what the URL says. _ [Todays Threads] [This Message] [Subscription] [Fast Unsubscribe] [User Settings]
RE: CMS Solutions (Friendly URL's)
This is now moving into an off-topic realm, and maybe it is time to move it to cf-community, but I have to wonder why search engine makers said "A long URL isn't good." It seems sad that an entire industry has to bend and change to fit the rules that Google sets up. [Todays Threads] [This Message] [Subscription] [Fast Unsubscribe] [User Settings]
RE: CMS Solutions (Friendly URL's)
It's not the friendliness to users which is significant but rather the friendliness to search engines coupled with how they weight various aspects of a given resource on the web. Short URLs are given a much higher weight than long(er) URLs, (presuming the content is otherwise the same). Ditto again for the size of the query string on the URL. And relevancy of the name of the file in the URL, if any, also is given high weight *if* that also corresponds to in-document context. This is why the so-called 'search engine safe" URLs don't really do much for most sites if all they do is substitute slashes for ampersands and equals signs; most search engines will start decrementing relevancy weight once the URL is more than 2-3 levels deep. One needs short relevant file names in a short shallow URL corresponding to actual content in the document to make the biggest impact in the search engine rankings. -Original Message- From: Raymond Camden [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, December 31, 2003 4:33 PM To: CF-Talk Subject: RE: CMS Solutions (Friendly URL's) Just out of curiosity, but why is the URL "awful"? Sure, it's not something you can memorize, but outside of that, who cares how crazy it looks. The typical user will just bookmark it and not even notice what the URL says. _ [Todays Threads] [This Message] [Subscription] [Fast Unsubscribe] [User Settings]
RE: CMS Solutions (Friendly URL's)
Just out of curiosity, but why is the URL "awful"? Sure, it's not something you can memorize, but outside of that, who cares how crazy it looks. The typical user will just bookmark it and not even notice what the URL says. [Todays Threads] [This Message] [Subscription] [Fast Unsubscribe] [User Settings]
Re: CMS Solutions (Friendly URL's)
Take a look at this. index.cfm?ACTION=""> It's awful. I need a way to shorten this. The ACTION variable handles what "application" to access, The PERFORM varaibles handles the particular "Use Case" or Method of the a particular application I store the full navigation structure in the application scope as an array of structures so the Pindex and the GIndex points to the different Nodes in the navigation "packet". >FarCry CMS - open source > >http://farcry.daemon.com.au/ > >Theres a "friendly-url" plugin that allows for easy-to-remember urls. > >-d > - Original Message - > From: Bailey, Neal > To: CF-Talk > Sent: Wednesday, December 31, 2003 11:53 AM > Subject: CMS Solutions > > > Does anyone know of a good CMS in ColdFusion, possibly one that has nice URL > structure? > > > [Todays Threads] [This Message] [Subscription] [Fast Unsubscribe] [User Settings]
