Blog Permalink

    • 7 posts
    April 11, 2018 6:00 AM EDT

    The SE plugin "Blogs" is advertised as a way to boost SEO. I agree with this. However, I was informed that the current permalink structure of the blog posts will hurt me.

    It looks like SE inherently indexes each blog post with a series of numbers. The normal permalink standard for blog post is to look like this:

     

    http://sitename.com/blogs/title

     

    SE is currently indexing like:

     

    http://sitename.com/blogs/1/2/title

    http://sitename.com/blogs/1/3/title

    (And these numbers aren't dates.)

     

    Please advise.

     

     

     

    • Moderator
    • 6923 posts
    April 11, 2018 6:58 AM EDT

    Moved to feature requests as this is how it is designed. We need to improve it to change it.

    • 629 posts
    June 28, 2018 3:42 AM EDT

    I also noticed this. Yeah it's not decent. All the SE modules work that way.

  • October 3, 2019 8:41 PM EDT

    I agree that this should definitely be changed. I hadn't thought of it for SEO (since my own site has blogs as members-only), but it will definitely have a negative impact on that, and also it's just plain ugly for sharing purposes. Imagine... "Oh yeah, I have a blog! You can find it at https://demo.socialengine.com/blogs/2." Blech.

    Currently, Blog URLs follow this structure: https://demo.socialengine.com/blogs/[user_id]/[blog_id]/llama-trekking
    And user blog pages follow this structure: https://demo.socialengine.com/blogs/[user_id]

    The user id should never be used in the URL of any page--that should be an administrative, back-end only identifier that the user never sees. Instead, the username should be used (like it is for the URL of the profile, https://demo.socialengine.com/profile/jack). The results would be as follows.

    OLD: https://demo.socialengine.com/blogs/2/4/llama-trekking
    NEW: https://demo.socialengine.com/blogs/jack/4/llama-trekking

    OLD: https://demo.socialengine.com/blogs/2
    NEW: https://demo.socialengine.com/blogs/jack

     

    To take it one step further, I don't see why the inclusion of the blog id is necessary either. As it stands, slugs do not have to be unique, and the blog id is the unique identifier for the posts. (Indeed, you can currently remove the slug from the URL and it still takes you to the post: https://demo.socialengine.com/blogs/2/4/) On other blogging websites I am familiar with (namely Wordpress), slugs are forced to be unique, so the slug can serve as the unique identifier. And in the case of two posts with the same title, the slug becomes numbered (e.g., https://demo.socialengine.com/blogs/2/4/llama-trekking-2).

    Both requests taken together, that results in a blog url that looks like this: https://demo.socialengine.com/blogs/jack/llama-trekking  I think that is a much more appealing URL for the user, and will score higher for SEO. The second suggestion is, I think, less important though--the most important thing is that the username be included in the URL, so that a human can look at it and recognize what user it belongs to.