SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

Pligg Search Engine Optimization methods are an easy way to increase your sites search engine rankings. Pligg provides the ability to alter your URLs, Meta Tags, Meta Titles and Page Titles. These settings will help your site rank high with search engine results (SER) and make your search engine placements more accurate to the content on your site.

URL Methods

Pligg offers 2 "URL Methods", the first is the basic, less search engine friendly, method that uses URLs like:

/story.php?title=example-title

These urls aren't very search engine or user friendly. They don't include category information and appear to search engines as php pages which generally don't rank as well as static pages. When you enable URL Method 2 you will see the URL change to:

/category_name/example_title/

The benefit of having this category style is

Enabling SEO URLs for Pligg

To enable URL Method 2 you will need to configure Pligg from the admin page. Navigate to /admin_config.php?page=SEO (as of Pligg 1.0) and set the URL Method value to 2.

Now you will need to make a couple manual edits to the "htacces.default" file that comes with Pligg and then rename that file to ".htaccess". First you will need to navigate to the Category Manager page, which is found within the admin panel for Pligg. Scroll down to the bottom of that page and look for 2 lines that need to be copied, both lines will begin with "RewriteRule". Copy those two lines and paste them (replacing the existing 2 lines) in the .htaccess file. You will see these two existing lines just below the comment line that mentions "category management".

Now you might also need to change some other htaccess settings if you have installed Pligg on a subdomain or in a folder that isn't on the root of the domain. I suggest that you quickly read through the htaccess file and make changes accordingly, most of the main settings are commented in such a way that it should be easy to figure out if you need to change them. You can also rename some of the URLs to make it fit your site. For example you could rename every "story" page to "article".

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This article has been rewritten on January 7, 2009. The original article content can be seen in the first comment to this article.