Search Engine Friendly Links for Articles

Hi there, Everyone:

is there a way to make the URLs for articles more Search engine Friendly?

I created an article and the URL is like:

www . mydomain.com/community/m/articles/view/Will-this-Article-work

firstly, it would be great if we could end the article in a file extension (such as htm or .php) and it would be great if we could eliminate the need for the/m/articles/view/ in the URL as well.

Is there any way to do this?

thanks in advance.

if there is a way then I want it too....

This would be possibly the most needed 'mod' if there was an internal URL shortening type service!

Its the same for business listings, events, anything.

The only short URL you will find is profiles which follow the site domain immediately.

@ daihlo:

Its the same for business listings, events, anything.

Speaking of business listings and events, do you know of good modules for those?

Would love to have a "do it all" setup where aside from the community, I could have a business directory and workshops listings (in different cities).

 For Business listing module, see http://www.boonex.com/m/Premium_Business_Listings

 For Events module, see http://www.boonex.com/m/Premium_Events_Maps_News_Venue_Sponsors

I use the ones for Modzzz as posted above. 

Both do the job great.

I posted this once before, so i will do it again. Many people want to take out the /m/whatever from the url, however if you do you end up with something like this.

http://www.yoursite.com/can you tell what this page is
http://www.yoursite.com/our how about this one
http://www.yoursite.com/and this one
http://www.yoursite.com/or this one

Those links could be to a blog, a forum post, a group forum post, an article, or something else. When you look at just the url, can you tell the difference? If not, then neither can your web server. The url contains information that identifies where to load the page from. Without it, it cannot be loaded. the m means module, article means the article module.

Perhaps the m could be removed, or changed to something else, and other things could also be done, but at leat ONE UNIQUE label of some kind must be after the url but before the final page to tell the system what it is. You cannot just take out everything that identifies what it is.

That would be like taking the house numbers or mailbox numbers off every house on a street. Do so and you can't find the address you're looking for.

@ modzzz

Thanks for the links.

Question about the Premium Business Listings module. Can I have one listing appear in multiple categories?

For example: If I have two categories:

1) Pet supplies

2) Pet grooming

Can Bpb's House Of Pets appear in BOTH categories without having to create two separate listings. Can he create ONE listing for his business and assign it to BOTH categories?

(I would like this to avoid duplicate content. I don't want google or other search engines to see TWO copies of the listings page under two different URLs)

Also, can I noindex certain categories? Say I start a category but don't have any listings in it yet. I don't want google to come an index it. So can I noindex it temporarily until I get some listings in there?

Thanks in advance.

@ deano92964

Thanks for the explanation.

I understand there has to be some way to let dolphin know which type of file to serve up.

I just wish there was a more elegant way to serve it up.

So instead of /m/articles/view/ in the URL, if it could just be shortened to /articles/ that would be great.

Thanks

As long as it does not conflict with something else then it can be done.

To do that you would edit the .htaccess file and just before the line

RewriteRule ^m/(.*)$  modules/index.php?r=$1 [QSA,L]

Add this just above it.

RewriteRule ^articles/(.*)$  modules/index.php?r=articles/view/$1 [QSA,L]

That will default all urls that are prefixed with articles/ to the view article URL. So your new url would be mysite.com/articles/name of article

If you need to shorten the rest of them, the articles have links to home, archive, top, popular, featured, tags, catagories, calender and search. All of them would have to have a unique identifier if you are to shorten them all.

@ deano92964

Thank you for the help.

Would I then have to change the links in the php files so that it used the short links format?

If so, which files would I have to change?

Thanks in advance.

Not sure. It most likley would, and what files to change i would not be able to tell you because i do not know.