#6917 – Use menu path rather than categories

Hi

but currently it seems mostly random, or at least mysterious to me .

There is really zero randomness in it. At least if we talk about Joomla content and you have not changed the default settings, URLs are similar to:

- articles: /top-category/sub-category/article-alias or /top-category/sub-category/article-alias.html
- categories: /top-category/sub-category/

Always like this, no variation and nothing that depends on site navigation.

One thing you may be missing is the need to delete URLs after changing URL-structure-related settings:

- under "Extensions" -> "Joomla", you'll see settings related to the URL structure. For instance, say you do not want to have any category in articles URLs (/top-category/sub-category/article-alias --> /article-alias) , that where you can change that. Likewise if you want IDs or date.
- Once you change that setting, you need to go to the SEF URL manager and PURGE URLs. This will delete all the URLs in the database that were built following the previous rules so that new ones, using the new rules, can be built
- you then visit your site home page, which will trigger the rebuild of all URLs on that home page.

Does this shed some light?

Best regards

Hi again

By the way, talking about configuration, you should not touch any setting under the "By component" tab of sh404SEF configuration. Settings on that page change the behavior described above, which can be useful to mimic Joomla URLs. However, it's a little bit going against the flow and so it's best avoided before you get to grip with sh404SEF general operation I think.

Best regards

Hi

And then it is apparently not just the categories. I have a link to an AcyMailing subscription form: Menu "Customer Center > Newsletter". What I get as URL is newsletter/modify - which is wrong, but I find no way to fix it. Tried with canonicals etc., nothing works.

You cannot change a URL with a canonical, those are unrelated concepts.

I'm not sure which AcyMailing page you are referring to but if Newsletter/modify is not what you want, you click on the URL in the URL manager and you change it to whatever you want it to be. That's much easier than having to fiddle with menu items and structure.

Important: if a URL has duplicates - which is what happens when one use menu items to build URLs, you'll need to customize all URLs. Read on if you want to start using menu items though.

I tried that: Show Category to "none". Changes nothing with "newsletter/modify", and many of the menu item lose their path completely. Making things worse.

Under "Extensions" -> "Joomla" you set things for Joomla content. Acymailing is not Jooomla content and we basically have no impact on the URLs it creates, the URLs are coming from their router.php file just like when Joomla SEF is in use - except for the automatic usage of the menu item which we do not do.

, and many of the menu item lose their path completely

Again, sh404SEF does not use menu items. There is no relationship between menu items and URLs. At all (unless you touch "By component" settings).

So if this can be done with ""By component" setting, I'd be happy to try.

Under "By component" you can change the way URLs are built, per component. The relevant setting for you is the one found in the second column of drop-down select.
This normally reads Use sh404SEF plugin if available.
You can change that to Use routrer.php with menu item. This will be the closest to Joomla URLs you can get.

For this setting to take effect, you must delete the URLs for that component after changing the setting. URLs are stored in the database and are not modified just by changing that setting. You need to delete them then load your site home page which will create all URLs on that page .

Best regards

Hi

It would be useful if there was an option to use menu item alias instead of category. But that seems to be against your philosophy

It's not so much against the philosophy that against any SEO principle on this planet. An item of content should have a URL. That URL should not depend on which menu items you clicked through to get to it. In your example, what if the site has multiple links to that category? which one should I use?

That's really a bad way of doing URLs, but unfortunately I'm not sure how Jooma can get rid of it - in a backward compatible manner.

Best regards

Hi

> It's not so much against the philosophy that against any SEO principle on this planet.

Well, I disagree, but that my be just differences in details of our understanding. After all, Google sees the URLs, not where they come from

I think we actually agree, that's exactly my point. If you build URLs based on menu items, then the same article, piece of content, will have 2 or more URLs, one per menu item.
What sh404SEF enforces is that this can never happen because an article can only have one single URL, regardless of how many menu item are pointing to it. Remember, with Joomla SEF system, the same content will have different URLs based on the menu item used (unless you use "System links -> Alias" for the additional link, which maybe 10% of Joomla users know that it exists and what it's for).

> That URL should not depend on which menu items you clicked through to get to it.

Not necessarily. It should just be logical, unique and ideally contain keywords.

See above: if the URL depends on the menu, then there will be several URL for the same content.

Usually (I even think always, but not 100% sure), each of my pages have only one link, defined by the navigation

That's just you! and if it's not guaranteed by the system then it will happen (a lot) just by mistake or small problems, often in modules for instance (which do not properly search for the menu item associated for a piece of content and then just use the current Itemid).

So there's always only one menu path, i.e. a unique and logical URL to each page.

Again, that's just you, and it's good that you do that but it can only work for sites where a human being can grasp the entire site.
Also, and very importantly, if a module or plugin on your site generates links with a wrong or missing menu item, you would never know about it. It may be that this happened on one or more of your sites, for years and you'd never know - because Joomla does not have a list of URLs on your site. Only search engines would know, and see all those duplicates. You could possibly track that with Google Search console for instance but most of times, you'd just do not know.

But if I go by category, what if an article or product belongs to several categories, which often happens. Depending on the component, there may be a way to set canonical categories, but not always. Which category do you use? How about tags?

If I go by menu path, I can choose to add the category to the path (same for tags), or not (mostly I would).

Not sure I follow you. You will have to insert categories in links and then you have duplicates. If the extension you use to have content in multiple categories does not have a way to insert a proper canonical, you cannot avoid duplicate content issues in that case, regardless on how you manage your links.
With tags, I'm not sure I see what the problem is: the link to the final article/product found on a tag page is not modified by the fact it' s on a tag page or elsewhere.

It just seems much more complicated to me, maybe just because I'm not used to that concept. Especially when working with components like AcyMailing that don't have categories for some pages.

Maybe it's about getting used to the concept, but basically there's no concept. A piece of conten is stored in a location (category hierarchy + title) and it's URL is always built based on that locatio, so that it never changes.
If the URL can change based on any cause (how you navigate to it in the case of Joomla) then you end up with multiple links going to the same content and we do not want that.

Best regards

Hi

Yes, I like having these discussions, they are worthwhile because we get different angles on what's best but also on what's doable for different people. It's all about tradeoffs and at some point we may well remove the SEF URLs part of sh404SEF entirely if it becomes to hard to grasp or if the benefits become less obvious.

Many people (including myself) want to have a list of the pages on a site (and attach descriptions,structured data, OGP, customize them, etc). But you can't do that with Joomla SEF because you only get a list of menus and separately a list of content items but each item may have multiple urls (and constitute different "pages" for search engines) and so you can never have a real list of your pages.

Anyway, thanks for the chat! closing this ticket now, feel free to open a new one as needed. If you do so, please mention this ticket number in the new one.

If you created any superadmin account for us, be sure to delete or block it now to avoid unnecessary risk in the future.

Best regards