Hi,
I'm using the Pathauto module to define the path of nodes.
From a SEO point of view, would you recommend the use of hierarchical alias?
As an example consider the pattern for the posts of my site www.clipperz.com.
users/[user]/blog/
Every time I publish a new post
http://www.clipperz.com/users/marco/blog/2007/05/18/clipperz_compact_in_...
several index aliases are generated
http://www.clipperz.com/users/
http://www.clipperz.com/users/marco/
http://www.clipperz.com/users/marco/blog/
http://www.clipperz.com/users/marco/blog/2007/
http://www.clipperz.com/users/marco/blog/2007/05/
http://www.clipperz.com/users/marco/blog/2007/05/18/
Is there any advantage in having the above list of alias?
Many thanks,
Marco
--
www.clipperz.com
online password manager
Comments
index aliases vs. views trickery
I can't comment on whether the index aliases help you with SEO. I think they are valuable for users and users are important to me.
I can comment that you should not use index aliases because they are very slow both themselves and they slow down a site in general by filling up the url_alias table.
See the pathauto recipes for advice on how to achieve this using the views module instead of the pathauto index alias function.
--
Knaddisons Denver Life | mmm Free Range Burritos
knaddison blog | Morris Animal Foundation
I think index aliases are
I think index aliases are not good for SEO and I would not agree that they provide much benefit for the users. The creation time for nodes is stored anyway so you could build an archive view using these data.
Using index aliases will not only bloat the url_aliases table but will generate many pages with similar or even duplicate content and will add many more navigational links. Too much navigational choices don't increase a site's usability.
If you still want to use them I'd recommend that you exclude these URL from being spidered in your robots.txt. One reason is that it will save a lot of traffic through search bots and the other is that duplicate content pages may end up in the supplemental index. So it would be possible that the actual node view is in the supplemental index whereas an index alias page is shown in the SERPs.
Index aliases
In this case it creates too many index aliases.
Also, the directory depth is very deep. Check out this PPT file:
http://www.ysearchblog.com/files/wmw2004/search-friendly-design.ppt
Why not do the following -- no index aliases required:
example.com/blogs/[user]/[title]
example.com/blog -- shows blog posts by all users
example.com/blogs/[user] -- shows "home page" of that user's blog
example.com/blogs/[user]/[title] -- shows the blog post
If you do it the way you mentioned above you will probably have duplicate content because you have so many different ways you are outputting marco's content.
more thoughts here
First, I created a video for this a while ago, but forgot to link to it from here: Hackable urls with pathauto and views.
Second, yaph says that this practice is "not good for SEO" - I'm surprised by that. Can you clarify what you mean?
In my opinion, hackable urls are an important part of site building. You should structure your views, navigation menus, pathauto patterns, etc. so that hackable URLs (aka index aliases) "just work". I don't know why people do something like create patterns like "session/year/node-title" and then put their navigation and view for all sessions at /sessions - it's just a sign of being sloppy or inattentive I think.
knaddison blog | Morris Animal Foundation
I have not noticed a problem
I have not noticed a problem with SEO having multiple aliases for content.
Consider that when you create tags, they can create URLs too for each tag eg http://faiththedog.info/category/tags/video which is handy way to collect the teasers of all the videos, which were created with various methods and content types. Some of the teasers will also appear on category pages for other tags, eg http://faiththedog.info/category/tags/oprah
I have not found this duplication to be an issue, probably because each page has content that is different from the others along with the repeated content.
If you find that multiple aliases are desirable for your navigation, you can also block (compliant) search spiders from indexing redundant virtual directories with robots.txt
¿ are you netsperienced ?
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comment seems unrelated
I don't see how this is related.
Index aliases are when you setup your aliases and your views to work together:
Similarly:
For you these are all 404s.
knaddison blog | Morris Animal Foundation
greggles, OP said that
greggles, OP said that aliases are generated for nodes with pathauto - it did not mention views - you later added the views discussion
my comment was going back to the original question about multiple aliases and SEO - and my examples were about taxonomy aliases generated with pathauto
I was demonstrating how some of the same content appears on both http://faiththedog.info/category/tags/oprah and http://faiththedog.info/category/tags/video but I do not think that is necessarily bad for SEO
the 404s you noted are for paths that are not used, not linked, etc.
although you may be focused on views aliases, the question here is whether hierarchical aliases generated with pathauto with some of the same content are detrimental to SEO - in other words, pages that contain more and more specific content. My case with a "videos" page having Oprah's videos, and an "oprah" page with some of the same videos is a related situation.
¿ are you netsperienced ?
♥ follow me @decibelplaces ∞
The issue would be that your
The issue would be that your two pages will compete with each other for say "Oprah videos" in the search results, but chances are your custom created Oprah video page is going to be better than the page created by Drupal. Therefore Google will always show your custom page ahead of the other one in the results so it's really a non-issue. If you're really worried about it you can disallow anything in the category/* folder in .htaccess.
Simon Vreeswijk,
Stikky Media | SEO Drupal
@SimonV perhaps you meant
@SimonV perhaps you meant disallow in robots.txt?
actually, the category pages show a list of teasers - and category/tags/video and category/tags/oprah are both pages of teasers. There is a node for the Oprah video itself, which I agree would fare better in SERP, but the point I was making is that it appears on at least three URLs (actually the node has a few more tags which also generate URLs for pages)
@greggles I know you that know what you're talking about, I have followed you for years - but my post addressed having repeated content on multiple URLs in Drupal, whether they are created by Pathauto, Views, or Taxonomy is not very relevant.
also I did not notice until now that OP is from 2007 and your post bumped it up, I saw it in my email digest and thought I could add some insight since I build for SEO, SMO and usability.
¿ are you netsperienced ?
♥ follow me @decibelplaces ∞
Opps, I absolutely meant
Oops, I absolutely meant robots.txt.
If the page you want to appear high in the SERPS will outperform the others then what is the issue? Google has stated that there in no penalty for duplicate content especially within one site, but that you will have pages within your site competing with each other and Google will decide which one to display. If the page you wish to show the world is winning then it's not really a cause for concern.
I understand that those category pages are kind of annoying and I generally disallow them, but I don't think that allowing them to be indexed will hurt your site at all.
Simon Vreeswijk,
Stikky Media | SEO Drupal
indeed
The OP was discussing index aliases. These existed in Pathauto circa 2007 and were removed for a variety of reasons. The only way to achieve them now is with Views or custom code.
When it comes to Pathauto, I think I know what I'm talking about. Maybe.
knaddison blog | Morris Animal Foundation