[specialone]

Hi guys,

We noticed the other day when we decided to upgrade our pligg v9.9.5 website to v1.0.0 RC5 that all the url story paths have now changed within the new version? This is very damaging for our SEO as we have over 8'000 pages indexed by google with most having a PR rank of between 1 and 5, for the url structure to be changed in this way is madness and provides no addition SEO benefits. The fact it damages them even on fresh install by adding a usless word /category/ to the url structure.

In v9.9.5 our URL structure for sites looked like the example below.

http://pligg.com/World-News/why-did-you-add-category

However in v1.0.0 all the link structure has changed and now has the string /category/ included in the url like example below.

http://pligg.com/category/World-News/why-did-you-add-category

This simple change has now seen us revert back to v9.9.5 and made us unsure whether we can upgrade to v1.0.0 in the future.

We could as suggest here in the forums apply a 301 redirect to all our story links but why should we? shouldn't this change have been researched and thought out to keep a consistent url structure before implementation? I don't mind all the usual template changes with each release but when url structure is changed for no good reason it's rather annoying.

Any pligg site updating to v1.0.0 is going to see a massive fall in organic traffic with 404 errors on every story unless they 301 redirect them all. Even then all your back links that you fought hard to get will be to pages with a 301 and not the original url they are linked from.

This minor change is a major pain in the ass and will also damage SEO instead of improving it, lost search traffic and longer url with a useless keyword is what this changes has achieved.

Is their anyway that the story URL's can be kept the same as before without the word category in the v1.0.0 final.

Other than this all the other changes seem absolutely great.

[Techkr]

http://forums.pligg.com/general-help...=category+word

http://forums.pligg.com/customizatio...=category+word

[specialone]

Hi Techkr,

Thanks for the links but i had read both of those prior to posting and to be honest don't think that we should be hacking an RC candidate instead of pushing for this to be included as standard in v1.0.0 final.

We had also already tried the method you suggest in html1.php and .htaccess before posting and found that the hack has many errors.

For one if you delete the story re-write lines from the .htaccess as you suggest all story links understandably throw back a 404, the same is true for category links. Alternatively if you instead remove the word /category/ from the .htaccess you can no longer enter you admin section of pligg due to the reg ex of the story re-write item.

The word category within the actual category URL structure is nothing to worry about really and similar to WordPress, but having this in the story URL is not ideal as is a hack (Very Grateful For The Effort) but unfortunatley is not part of the official core and has some errors.

This bug needs to be addressed officially by the developers before any offfical v1.0.0 release can be made public, although i noticed the main download on the pligg homepage is an RC version already which will be confusing users? It may have been better having the pligg homepage deliver v9.9.5 at the moment until v1.0.0 is official and not an RC, thats the way nearly every other open source cms system on the planet delivers updates.

RC version for early adopters, geeks, fans and Stable version for the n00bs.

so pretty please can we have the story urls looking like below and incorporated into the pligg core for the official v1.0.0 release?

http://pligg.com/World-News/why-did-you-add-the-word-category

[Yankidank]

1. I mostly agree with the story URLs not having the word category. I only disagree with the idea because by removing the /category/ on the story page it disrupts the intuitive nature of the URLs. You either have to always have /category/ or never have it.

2.The reason we do have /category/ is to reduce the chances of people screwing up their site by naming a category to something forbidden such as "live" which would conflict with the /live url already in use. Trust me when I say we would have at least a dozen people breaking their site within a month because they wouldn't be able to figure out what the problem is. Rather than making a forbidden category list (which would constantly be changing) I thought that it would make a lot more sense to just add /category/ as a description for how the URL is being sorted.

3. The 1.0.0 RC versions are WAY more stable than the beta series. We only apply the RC tag because we aren't comfortable with web hosts providing it as one-click installs at this moment. The beta series for Pligg is really out of date and suffers from security holes that have been patched in the RC versions. I'm not going to go into details about our naming scheme for releases, but assume that if we give it any official name whether it be release candidate, beta or alpha it's important that you upgrade. The tags are only used as a warning of the stability of the software for broader use. For some reason there will always be that person who thinks Pligg should run on their iPhone webserver or a Win 95 machine. We try to accommodate as many of those people along with the more common servers and with each release the coverage broadens to a wider audience.

4. I will look into providing a 301 redirect hack with 1.0 so that sites upgrading won't have expired links. That way search engines would update their links rather quickly, plus it would be helpful if we rewrote a more advanced sitemap module.

[specialone]

Hi Yanki,

Thanks for the excellent and fast reply but i still don't understand why we must have the word category in the actual story URL at all?

In a category URL as i explained that is fine and as you pointed out with your live page example i totally agree that actual category URL's should feature the word /category/.

Quote: " /category/ on the story page it disrupts the intuitive nature of the URLs." Your are right on this one but not in the way you describe. What this change to the actual story URL's will do is force a massive percentage of your members to hack their install as they do not want the word /category/ in an actual story URL. Fine for categories but not for stories.

1. It looks ugly, provides no benefit, and lengthens the url string.
2. it hurts SEO factors with moving important keywords to the right and adds a useless keyword into the url that provides no SEO benefits.

Canonical URL's are important for SEO hence a lot of optimized systems even remove stop words like, a, the, and, or, at from the actual story, post, article URL and redirect to stop duplicate content.

As a friendly suggestion i would still remove the word /category/ from the actual story URL only, otherwise in my opinion v1.0.0 will throw back many "How Do I Remove The Word Category From Story Urls" posts when v1.0.0 is officially released. You must have already noticed that this exact conversation and provided hacks are taking place at the moment within the forum and most users don't want /category/ in their story URL's.

I for one don't want /category/ word in my story URL's as i am sure many others will feel the same, i also however don't want to be left in a position where the only option is to hack my brand new install of what is a greatly improved system before it's even officially released. Could we maybe have a poll on this subject and put it to the pligg members with a vote?

Cheers and keep up the great work