Pligg Google SEO Friendly URL Rewrite Hack

[mendim]

A default Pligg story URL once rewritten looks like the example below.

PHP Code:


http://www.designfloat.com/General/Joshua_Glenn_Taking_Things_Seriously/ 


What stands out is the use of _ Underscores within the URL, Google prefers the use of a hyphen/dash - as a separator and for more information on this read the Blog post by Matt Cutt’s who works for Google. This excerpt below taken from Matt’s blog post should indicate exactly why a hyphen/dash is a better separator. Visit Matt's Blog

Matt Cutts wrote:
With underscores, Google’s programmer roots are showing. Lots of computer programming languages have stuff like _MAXINT, which may be different than MAXINT. So if you have a url like word1_word2, Google will only return that page if the user searches for word1_word2 (which almost never happens). If you have a url like word1-word2, that page can be returned for the searches word1, word2, and even “word1 word2″.

So how do we fix this? luckily Adam over at Pligg Template has provided some code to clean up the Pligg URL system to be more Search Engine Friendly. We will use some of that code to achieve a nice clean URL system like below.

PHP Code:

http://www.designfloat.com/general/joshua-glenn-taking-things-seriously/ 


Open

PHP Code:

libs/utils.php and FIND 


PHP Code:

$output = utf8_substr($input, 0, 240); 


REPLACE WITH

PHP Code:

$output = utf8_strtolower($input, 0, 240); 


PHP Code:

libs/utils.php 


and FIND

PHP Code:

$output = str_replace("\"", "", $output); 


REPLACE WITH

PHP Code:

$output = str_replace(" - ", "-", $output);
$output = str_replace("_", "-", $output);
$output = str_replace("---", "-", $output);
$output = str_replace("\"", "", $output);
$output = str_replace("--", "-", $output); 


Now you have lovely clean and Google friendly URL’s note for categories you must manually create categories in lowercase from the Admin section of pligg or your htaccess won’t work. Also this change should not be applied to an existing site unless you know how to 310 redirect content that is currently indexed under the old url system or you have a very small site with very little indexed story content.

i found this

[pliggedit]

A little backlink or some mention would have been nice

Pligg Google SEO Friendly URL Rewrite Hack : SEO Hacks

And a search.
http://forums.pligg.com/pligg-tutori...tructions.html

[mendim]

yes in botom i write i found this

[Cuilan]

I don't see how this mod helps seo. It does little if nothing at all for Google.

[pliggedit]

Originally Posted by Cuilan

I don't see how this mod helps seo. It does little if nothing at all for Google.

That's where your completley wrong

What stands out is the use of _ Underscores within the URL, Google prefers the use of a hyphen/dash - as a separator and for more information on this read the Blog post by Matt Cutt’s who works for Google. This excerpt below taken from Matt’s blog post should indicate exactly why a hyphen/dash is a better separator.

Google Employee Matt Cutts blog post about this subject.
Dashes vs. underscores

[y2ki]

If DASH is more SEO friendly then Why Digg, indiasphere.net and other popular sites are using DASH instead of UNDERSCORE and case sensitive URL???

[Divisive Cotton]

Originally Posted by y2ki

If DASH is more SEO friendly then Why Digg, indiasphere.net and other popular sites are using DASH instead of UNDERSCORE and case sensitive URL???

pliggedit's right in that it should be hyphen rather than underscore. some people that it will produce a noticeable difference to search engine positions.
digg also has multiple same meta descriptions. i guess a site like digg doesn't care about seo because they have a massive user already.

[tendulkar2]

hi.. I created a site 2 days ago.. and no problem with underscores...
Mine is already crawling nicely...already indexed about 50 pages in 2 days...

[ajayrockrock]

It's not about indexing, it's about searching. I have a ton of pages indexed and I'd like more google organic search results, here's what Matt Cutts from google said:

"So if you have a url like word1_word2, Google will only return that page if the user searches for word1_word2 (which almost never happens). If you have a url like word1-word2, that page can be returned for the searches word1, word2, and even “word1 word2″."

Indexing is great and all, but you'll get pulled up in more searches if you use dashes instead of underscores. I'm going to give this a shot and see what happens once I figure out the 301 redirect stuff... Anyone have any tips on changing the url structure and properly redirecting so I don't lose any of the current searches?

[y2ki]

Originally Posted by ajayrockrock

It's not about indexing, it's about searching. I have a ton of pages indexed and I'd like more google organic search results, here's what Matt Cutts from google said:

"So if you have a url like word1_word2, Google will only return that page if the user searches for word1_word2 (which almost never happens). If you have a url like word1-word2, that page can be returned for the searches word1, word2, and even “word1 word2″."

Indexing is great and all, but you'll get pulled up in more searches if you use dashes instead of underscores. I'm going to give this a shot and see what happens once I figure out the 301 redirect stuff... Anyone have any tips on changing the url structure and properly redirecting so I don't lose any of the current searches?

You will have absolutely Lost current searches.