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#6406 – Effect of using sh404SEF on new site that has lots of relative links

Posted in ‘Pre-sale questions’

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Thursday, 13 April 2017 00:55 UTC

gsande

Hi,
I have been working on a new large site, which is not yet published anywhere (noindex,nofollow in place), and I have not published to any search engines.

I am evaluating using sh404SEF for this new Joomla site (version 3.6.5) that has over 500 menu items, and also has a lot of internal RELATIVE hyperlinks referring to other pages in the site. This website is live, but has been set to "No Index, No Follow", and is not yet listed with Google or any other search engine. This would seem the ideal time to implement sh404SEF.

I have three pre-sale questions:

1. Internal links to other pages in the site all use relative links rather than absolute. Will use of sh404SEF break those internal relative links? Will I need to relink them all.

2. In this site, I use PhocaDownload, and have embedded lots of links to the documents stored in the PhocaDownload component of the site. I understand that a plug-in exists to make PhocaDownload component compatible with sh404SEF.

3. In the Global Configuration, I have these set as follows, and developed all the menu aliases with these settings, and want to know if it will cause any conflict with sh404SEF:

Search Engine Friendly URLs - YES (all my menu aliases were manually done to use search engine friendly aliases using keywords where possible.
Use URL Rewriting - YES (my htaccess file was created)
Add Suffix to URL - NO
Unicode Aliases - YES (in your video, it shows this was left as NO, but I had originally changed it to YES.

Will these things cause me a problem implementing sh404SEF?

I look forwarding to hearing back, and I'm ready to purchase and move ahead extremely quickly.

Thanks
Gary

gsande

Thursday, 13 April 2017 07:41 UTC

wb_weeblr

Hi

It depends on what you call "relative" URLs, and whether those URLs are SEF already or not.

For sh404SEF, or any SEF extension, to work properly links in your content must be created as non-sef URLs in the content editor:
[code type="markup"]index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1&Itemid=101[/code]

This is the normal and expected way, and if you do that, then Joomla can pick up those URLs in your content, and transform them into SEF URLs when the page is displayed, either itself directly or by calling upon sh404SEF to do the transformation.

If you directly hardcode a real SEF URL as a relative URLs as in:

[code type="markup"]<a href="/about-us">About us</a>[/code]

Then:

1 - Joomla will not see this and will never pass it to sh404SEF for recording or managing. We can't do anything with that.
2 - This link will not work (triggers a 404), even with only Joomla SEF unless a/ it is found on the home page or b/ you use one of those plugins to modify the base tag into an incorrect one, allowing this kind of relative links to work (but the incorrect base tag will break things, including all anchors on the page).

I understand that a plug-in exists to make PhocaDownload component compatible with sh404SEF.

We do not provide specific support for PhocaDownload, there are just too many Joomla plugins to be able to do that. sh404SEF will make use of the router.php plugin that PhocaDownload normally provides to operate together with standard Joomla SEF.

all my menu aliases were manually done

We do not use menu aliases at all when building URLs, but only elements of the content item itself, ie categories, item title, etc.

I am evaluating using sh404SEF for this new Joomla site (version 3.6.5) that has over 500 menu items

Why do you have so many menu items? are they required for your users to navigate through your content? That seems extreme.

From your message, the first thing that needs to be cleared is whether you hardcode your links in your content, or you use the Joomla non-sef format.

Rgds

Thursday, 13 April 2017 19:25 UTC

gsande

Hi, thank you for your reply. Obviously, it sounds like I have some work to do, but I'm not sure if I communicated well enough in the previous email.

You asked this question:
• From your message, the first thing that needs to be cleared is whether you hardcode your links in your content, or you use the Joomla non-sef format.

As I mentioned, when I started the site, I changed the "SEF Friendly" option in the Joomla Configuration to YES, and for EVERY article, I customized the article alias to a custom one using relevant terms and keywords, I also created a menu item for every article, and manually created appropriate menu alias for each menu item. It is a relative large site, with thousands of products, so there are actually 318 menu items rather than 500 (I just counted). My understanding is that Joomla really wants/needs a menu item for each article, and that Joomla displays and uses the menu URL rather than the article URL (also matching the URL shown in the sitemap) which is supplied to search engines.

Below are some simple/short sample article aliases of pages on the site, along with the menu name and alias (sorry the chart is just pasted in and not formatted for html). These are mostly from one main menu item, but I have a tiered menu structure.

Section: About
Article Title: Capabilities
Article Alias: capabilities
Menu Title: Capabilities
Menu Alias: capabilities

Section: About
Article Title: About Us
Article Alias: about-us
Menu Title: About
Menu Alias: about

Section: About
Article Title: Career Opportunities
Article Alias: jobs
Menu Title: Jobs
Menu Alias: jobs

Section: About
Article Title: Career Opportunities
Article Alias: jobs
Menu Title: Jobs
Menu Alias: jobs

Section: Products/molds/panels
Article Title: Textured Mold
Article Alias: mold-panel-textured
Menu Title: Textured Panel Mold
Menu Alias: mold-panel-textured

“Internal” Links that I’ve placed in various articles:

Some pages (articles) have links to other related pages included in the article. Where these links exist, they were set up to use the menu link I created, rather than the default Joomla content editor link (the example you provided in your email was
index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1&Itemid=101

These links are examples of links that have been added to a Joomla article, and use the menu alias for the link to the designated page/article. These are also shown above in the chart. All such links in all cases are “relative” rather than absolute in that they exclude the external http://domain name prefix that would be used on an external/absolute link to another external site for instance.
<a href="/products/molds/showers/univshowrpan">
<a href="/products/molds/showers/1052showpan">

These links function fine, and direct the viewer to the article that the menu item is assigned to, and more importantly does not create a second URL linking to a page.

These questions presume that I’d like to use sh404SEF, but need to understand what I would have to do to be compatible?

1. Can I use sh404SEF at all given that I have created custom article aliases and also custom menu links to every article?

2. As far as the internal links to other pages that I’ve included on some pages that use the menu url as the link, if I were to redo them all to use the default
Joomla content editor format (in this form - index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1&Itemid=101), would that work?

I appreciate your assistance so that I can hopefully utilize your component.
Thanksl
Gary

gsande

Friday, 14 April 2017 07:47 UTC

wb_weeblr

My understanding is that Joomla really wants/needs a menu item for each article, and that Joomla displays and uses the menu URL rather than the article URL (also matching the URL shown in the sitemap) which is supplied to search engines.

Not at all. There is no need to have per article menu item. You can do that if menus are the only way your visitors are supposed to navigate through your articles (that would be rather unusual), but that's not needed. Usually, you group items in categories, and you display a category view, which list items, and from there use can click through to articles. You can then decide on the navigation, ie the menu system: have one menu item per category, or a single menu item that link to the root category and will display items in that category, and then also all sub categories.

that Joomla displays and uses the menu URL rather than the article URL (also matching the URL shown in the sitemap) which is supplied to search engines.

The "article URL" does not exist. There is just one URL (well, Joomla can mess that up a bit sometimes) for an article. If you created a menu item for a single article, then that's going to be the one. If not, then a URL will be built based on the article alias, and also on the current menu item and categories the article belongs to.

, they were set up to use the menu link I created, rather than the default Joomla content editor link

Yes, but exactly what do you use to create the link. Please, just copy one single example of a <href="[redacted]x">link</>. I suspect you hardcode the link as in:
[code type="markup"]<a href="/my-menu-item">Click here</a>[/code]
instead of:
[code type="markup"]<a href="/?Itemid=12345">Click here</a>[/code]
which is a link to a menu item or
[code type="markup"]<a href="/helpdesk?id=12Itemid=12345&index_php?option=com_content&view=article">Click here</a>[/code]

If you have harcoded the links, as in my first example above, then sh404SEF simply cannot be used on your site, nor any other SEF extension, as Joomla will not "see" those URLs and will not send them to us (because they are already SEF).

Can I use sh404SEF at all given that I have created custom article aliases and also custom menu links to every article?

We will transform all the menu links all right. The links will be different though, as we will under no circumstances use the menu item alias, but instead build a URL based on the article title and the categories it belongs to. You have many settings to choose the URL structure, for instance include categories or not, only some if there are nested categories, include an id or not, etc

. As far as the internal links to other pages that I’ve included on some pages that use the menu url as the link, if I were to redo them all to use the default

Joomla content editor format (in this form - index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1&Itemid=101), would that work?

Yes, this is the standard way, and is a requirement.Hardcoding the links in your content means you can't easily manage them, and is less future-proof. For instance, in case of a future conversion to Joomla 4 that would require the upgrader to convert some URLs from Joomla 3 format to Joomla 4 (this is hypothetical), the converter will not see your link and won't be able to convert them. So basically it's not an sh404SEF question, but rather a sane way of creating links, at least in the context of Joomla.
Another one is to think about the navigation on the site, is it required to have so many menus items? is that a convenient navigation for visitors?

Rgds

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