I am developing a flight search engine for a customer, and currently the URLs look as follows (ad = destination airport, ao = origin airport, dates and number of passengers are not specified here):
http://example.com/#ad=S%C3%A3o+Paulo+-+Todos+os+aeroportos+(SAO),+Brasil&ao=Recife+-+Guararapes+Intl+(REC),+Brasil
My customer wants to make search pages more search engine friendly (SEO). The idea is that Brazilians who are looking for flights from, say, SAO to REC by e.g. Google should have a higher chance of finding that particular flight search engine.
The first step is probably replacing the fragment identifier (#) by a query string (?). The server then dynamically generates nice text content that can be viewed without JavaScript (search results would still be loaded via XHR). In my opinion, that makes a lot of sense.
Now, to make the URLs more search engine friendly:
(A) My customer proposes adding additional keywords into the URL, something like:
http://example.com?flights+to+Porto+Alegre&S%C3%A3o+Paulo+-+Todos+os+aeroportos+(SAO),+Brasil&ao=Recife+-+Guararapes+Intl+(REC),+Brasil
(B) I propose adding a slug instead, which can easily be internationalized, and which is good to read also for humans. Example:
http://example.com/pt_BR?ad=REC&ao=SAO/voos_de_Sao_Paulo_para_Recife
(C) Or, perhaps without a slug (but - due to parsability - only for a limited parameter set, which has the disadvantage of limiting sharing of URLs by users):
http://example.com/pt_BR/voos_de_Sao_Paulo_(SAO)_para_Recife_(REC)
What do you suggest? Any examples of good URLs for similar use cases?
That all being said: I understand that links from highly ranked pages are still the most important ranking measure. In the end, I wonder if all that complexity really is worth the effort. When I look at Google's own search pages, then they are rather simple. For example, there is no summary of the search query in a H1 tag, just as my customer wants. Of course, Google doesn't search itself...
don't use _ (underscore) to delimit words. Google interprets hello_world as one word but hello-world as two words.
don't put your human readable keywords in the query string (after the ?). Instead make it a normal URL http://example.com/pt_BR/search/voos-de-Sao-Paulo-(SAO)-para-Recife-(REC)
I would go for a something like: http://example.com/pt_BR/2012-10-28/voos-de-Sao-Paulo-(SAO)-para-Recife-(REC)
Related
I have a WordPress site (www.AgingSafely.com) and on it I have built a plugin to show the “Details” about various Adult Family Homes (AFHs). All of the details are retrieved out of database table via a query-string (?asi_id=WA_Af_nnnnn) where the n’s are the AFH’s license number. I have created a “Site Map” page (https://www.agingsafely.com/asi-site-map/) that lists an overview and has links to the Details Page for each AFH, so that Google can find and link them. They are also listed in sitemap.xml.
Google isn’t indexing them, but is indexing the more normal pages on my site.
I figure that I need to change my URLs from https://www.agingsafely.com/adult-family-home/?asi_id=WA_Af_751252 to something like https://www.agingsafely.com/adult-family-home/AFH/751252 to make Google happy. To add a little more complication, The “Af” in the query string is for “Adult Family Home”. The plugin also handles “Boarding Homes” “Bf” and “Nursing Facilities” “Nf”.
How do I get the URL with the ?asi_id=WA_Af_751252 rewritten to AFH/75152
This appears to two parts: Change the links in the plugins to the /AFH/nnnn format which should be easy. Have some re-write rule that converts the new URL format back to a query string.
What is the best way to do this?
Does Google ignore query strings?
Are you planning on a lot of people entering in that particular string in a google search? Possibly some will, but probably not. If you want people to be able to easily find your products/homes via google searches, yes I would change the links to something like https://www.agingsafely.com/adult-family-home/AFH/751252. Literally spell out as much as you can, unless a string is a popular part number that people search for or something like that.
Also, is your site integrated with google analytics and google search console? I would definitely do that if you haven't.
I am looking to create a website that generates content depending on your city location. The best Example I found was Craigslit.They generate a web domain name like https://yourcity.craigslist.org/ when you either click on the city or it locates where you are. I was just wondering if I could get some help on how to build something like that.
The web pages are created using a template that doesn't change, populated with data that is selected from a database server, using your location to lookup appropriate items.
The subdomain (your city) is usually defined in the DNS record, just like www. There would be an entry for chicago.craigslist.org, for example.
edit
If you're asking how they know where you are, they can take a guess based on your IP address, however this isn't very reliable. Google does this also, when getting you search results that could be localized.
So yeah, it is expected of you to type some stuff into google to (try) find your answer (like detect city from javascript will bring up a lot of results for your problem.)
But yeah you would use a service like https://ipstack.com/ to detect where you live, depending on where you live the accuracy increases. (EU has some rules and regulations that make it a lot less accurate than if you would be living in the US)
Once you have a database with content - For example craigslist has a database of second hand items sold by people from all over. When you connect to craigslist they ask a service where your request came from - then use some filter function based on your location to match the results.
Good luck
Your IP address can be used to make an educated guess as to where you are, but it's not very accurate. When providing you with search results that might be localised, Google also does this.To know more about creating a website like craigslist follow here
https://www.yarddiant.com/blog/classifieds/how-to-build-a-website-like-craigslist.html
I want to know if there is any api that can allow me to get the number of reviews from an url.
I know that google offers the possibility to get this number by using the placeid, but the only information I have is the url of the website of a company.
Any ideas please?
Maybe, but probably not.
Places API Text Search seems to be able to find places by their URL:
https://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/place/textsearch/json?key=YOURKEY&query=http://www.starbucks.com/store/1014527/us/303-congress-street/303-congress-street-boston-ma-02210
However, this is not a documented feature of the API and I do not think this can be relied upon, so I'd recommend filing a feature request, to make this a supported, reliable feature.
As for the amount of reviews, you may be interested in:
Issue 3484: Add # of reviews to the Place Details Results
I've written an API like this for Reviewsmaker, but I target specific business names not URLs. See this example (I activated a key for this purpose for now):
http://reviewsmaker.com/api/google/?business=life%20made%20a%20little%20easier&api_key=4a2819f3-2874-4eee-9c46-baa7fa17971c
Or, try yourself with any business name:
http://reviewsmaker.com/api/google/?business=Toys R Us&api_key=4a2819f3-2874-4eee-9c46-baa7fa17971c
The following call would return a JSON object which shows:
{
"results":{
"business_name":"Life Made A Little Easier",
"business_address":"1702 Sheepshead Bay Rd, Brooklyn, NY 11235, USA",
"place_id":"ChIJ_xjIR2REwokRH2qEigdFCvs",
"review_count":38
},
"api":{
"author":"Ilan Patao",
"home":"www.reviewsmaker.com"
}
}
Pinging this EP using a Chronjob for example once every hour or two and return the review_count can pretty much build your own review monitoring app;
You can probably do what you're looking for if you query the Places API Text Search or the CSE (Custom Search Engine) API to lookup the URL, return back the matching name of the business associated with this URL and calling an endpoint like this one to return back the associated review count.
You can probably code this in py or PHP. Not sure how familiar you are with data parsing, but I was able to build my API based on Google's CSE API. CSE provides metadata in its results which contain the total reviews, so if you create a CSE engine and use the CSE API looking for business schemas, review schemas, etc; you can return back items and within the PageMap node there are objects with data that you need very little tweaking to do (such as string replacing, trimming) which will return back the values you're looking for.
Hope my answer helped, at least to lead you in the right direction :)
I am developing a web application, in which I have the following type of search functionality;
Normal search: where user will enter the search keyword to search the records.
Popular: this is no a kind of search, it will display the popular records on the website, something as digg and other social bookmarking sites does.
Recent: In this I am displaying Recently added records in my website.
City Search: Here I am presenting city names to the user like "Delhi", "Mumbai" etc and when user click this link then all records from that particular city will be displayed.
Tag Search: Same as city search I have tag links, when user will click on a tag then all records marked with that tag will be displayed to the user.
Alphabet Search: Same as city and tag this functionality also has links of letters like "A", "B", .... etc and when user clicks on any letter link then all records starting with that particular letter will be displayed to the user
Now, my problem is I have to provide above listed searches to the user, but I am not able to decide that I'll go with one page (result.aspx) which will display all the searches records, and I'll figure using query string that which search is user is using and what data I have to display to the user. Such as, lets say I am searching for city, delhi and tag delhi-hotels then the urls for both will be as :
For City: www.example.com/result.aspx?search_type=city&city_name=delhi
For Tags: www.example.com/result.aspx?search_type=tag&tag_name=delhi-hotels
For Normal Search: www.example.com/result.aspx?search_type=normal&q=delhi+hotels+and+bar&filter=hotlsOnly
Now, I feels above Idea of using a single page for all searches is messy. So I thought of some more and cleaner Idea, which is using separate pages for all type of searches as
For City: www.example.com/city.aspx?name=delhi
For Tags: www.example.com/tag.aspx?name=delhi-hotels
For Normal Search: www.example.com/result.aspx?q=delhi+hotels+and+bar&filter=hotlsOnly
For Recent: www.example.com/recent.aspx
For Popular: www.example.com/popular.aspx
My new idea is cleaner and it tells specifically everything to the user that which page is for what, it also gives him idea that where he is now, what records he's seeing now. But the new idea has one problem, In case I have to change anything in my search result display then I have to make changes in all pages one by one, I thought that solution for this problem too, which is using user-control under repeater control, I'll pass all my values one by one to user-control for rendering HTML for each record.
Everything is fine with new Idea, But I am still no able to decide that with which I dea I have to go for, Can anyone tell me your thoughts on this problem.
I want to implement an idea which will be easy to maintain, SEO friendly (give good ranking to my website), user-friendly(easy to use and understand for the users)
Thanks.
One thing to mention on the SEO front:
As a lot of the "results" pages will be linking through to the same content, there are a couple of advantages to appearing* to have different URLs for these pages:
Some search engines get cross if you appear to have duplicate content on the site, or if there's the possiblity for almost infinite lists.
Analysing traffic flow.
So for point 1, as an example, you'll notice that SO has numberous ways of finding questions, including:
On the home page
Through /questions
Through /tags
Through /unanswered
Through /feeds
Through /search
If you take a look at the robots.txt for SO, you'll see that spiders are not allowed to visit (among other things):
Disallow: /tags
Disallow: /unanswered
Disallow: /search
Disallow: /feeds
Disallow: /questions/tagged
So the search engine should only find one route to the content rather than three or four.
Having them all go through the same page doesn't allow you to filter like this. Ideally you want the search engine to index the list of Cities and Tags, but you only need it to index the actual details once - say from the A to Z list.
For point 2, when analysing your site traffic, it will be a lot easier to see how people are using your site if the URLs are meaningful, and the results aren't hidden in the form header - many decent stats packages allow you to report on query string values, or if you have "nice" urls, this is even easier. Having this sort of information will also make selling advertising easier if that's what's you're interested in.
Finally, as I mentioned in the comments to other responses, users may well want to bookmark a particular search - having the query baked into the URL one way or another (query strings or rewritten url) is the simiplist way to allow this.
*I say "appearing" because as others have pointed out, URL rewriting would enable this without actually having different pages on the server.
There are a few issues that need to be addressed to properly answer your question:
You do not necessarily need to redirect to the Result page before being able to process the data. The page or control that contains the search interface on submitting could process the submitted search parameters (and type of search) and initiate a call to the database or intermediary webservice that supplies the search result. You could then use a single Results page to display the retrieved data.
If you must pass the submitted search parameters via querystring to the result page, then you would be much better off using a single Result page which parses these parameters and displays the result conditionally.
Most users do not rely on the url/querystring information in the browser's address bar to identify their current location in a website. You should have something more visually indicative (such as a Breadcrumbs control or header labels) to indicate current location. Also, as you mentioned, the maintainability issue is quite significant here.
I would definitely not recommend the second option (using separate result pages for each kind of search). If you are concerned about SEO, use URL rewriting to construct URL "slugs" to create more intuitive paths.
I would stick with the original result.aspx result page. My reasoning for this from a user point of view is that the actual URL itself communicates little information. You would be better off creating visual cues on the page that states stuff like "Search for X in Category Y with Tags Z".
As for coding and maintenance, since everything is so similar besides the category it would be wise to just keep it in one tight little package. Breaking it out as you proposed with your second idea just complicates something that doesn't need to be complicated.
Ditch the querystrings and use URL rewriting to handle your "sections".. much better SEO and clearer from a bookmark/user readability standpoint.
City: www.example.com/city/delhi/
Tag: www.example.com/tag/delhi-hotels/
Recent: www.example.com/recent/
Popular: www.example.com/popular/
Regular search can just go to www.example.com/search.aspx or something.
Important: This question isn't actually really an ASP.NET question. Anyone who knows anything about URLS can answer it. I just happen to be using ASP.NET routing so included that detail.
In a nutshell my question is :
"What URL format should I design that i can give to external parties to get to a specific place on my site that will be future proof. [I'm new to creating these 'REST' URLs]."
I need an ASP.NET routing URL that will be given to a third party for tracking marketing campaigns. It is essentially a 'gateway' URL that redirects the user to a specific page on our site which may be the homepage, a special contest or a particular product.
In addition to trying to capture the referrer I will need to receive a partnerId, a campaign number and possibly other parameters. I want to provide a route to do this BUT I want to get it right first time because obviously I cant easily change it once its being used externally.
How does something like this look?
routes.MapRoute(
"3rd-party-campaign-route",
"campaign/{destination}/{partnerid}/{campaignid}/{custom}",
new
{
controller = "Campaign",
action = "Redirect",
custom = (string)null // optional so we need to set it null
}
);
campaign : possibly don't want the word 'campaign' in the actual link -- since users will see it in the URL bar. i might change this to just something cryptic like 'c'.
destination : dictates which page on our site the link will take the user to. For instance PR to direct the user to products page.
partnerid : the ID for the company that we've assigned - such as SO for Stack overflow.
campaignid : campaign id such as 123 - unique to each partner. I have realized that I think I'd prefer for the 3rd party company to be able to manage the campaign ids themselves rather than us providing a website to 'create a campaign'. I'm not
completely sure about this yet though.
custom : custom data (optional). i can add further custom data parameters without breaking existing URLS
Note: the reason i have 'destination' is because the campaign ID is decided upon by the client so they need to also tell us where the destination of that campaign is. Alternatively they could 'register' a campaign with us. This may be a better solution to avoid people putting in random campaign IDs but I'm not overly concerned about that and i think this system gives more flexibility.
In addition we want to know perhaps which image they used to link to us (so we can track which banner works the best). I THINK this is a candiate for a new campaignid as opposed to a custom data field but i'm not sure.
Currently I am using a very primitive URL such as http://example.com?cid=123. In this case the campaign ID needs to be issued to the third party and it just isn't a very flexible system. I want to move immediately to a new system for new clients.
Any thoughts on future proofing this system? What may I have missed? I know i can always add new formats but I want to use this format as much as possible if that is a good idea.
This URL:
"campaign/{destination}/{partnerid}/{campaignid}/{custom}",
...doesn't look like a resource to me, it looks like a remote method call. There is a lot of business logic here which is likely to change in the future. Also, it's complicated. My gut instinct when designing URLs is that simpler is generally better. This goes double when you are handing the URL to an external partner.
Uniform Resource Locators are supposed to specify, well, resources. The destination is certainly a resource (but more on this in a moment), and I think you could consider the campaign a resource. The partner is not a resource you serve. Custom is certainly not a resource, as it's entirely undefined.
I hear what you're saying about not wanting to have to tell the partners to "create a campaign," but consider that you're likely to eventually have to go down this road anyway. As soon as the campaign has any properties other than the partner identifier, you pretty much have to do this.
So my first to conclusions are that you should probably get rid of the partner ID, and derive it from the campaign. Get rid of custom, too, and use query string parameters instead, should it be necessary. It is appropriate to use query string parameters to specify how to return a resource (as opposed to the identity of the resource).
Removing those yields:
"campaign/{destination}/{campaignid}",
OK, that's simpler, but it still doesn't look right. What's destination doing in between campaign and campaign ID? One approach would be to rearrange things:
"campaign/{campaignid}/{destination}",
Another would be to use Astoria-style indexing:
"campaign({campaignid})/{destination}",
For some reason, this looks odd to a lot of people, but it's entirely legal. Feel free to use other legal characters to separate campaign from the ID; the point here is that a / is not the only choice, and may not be the appropriate choice.
However...
One question we haven't covered yet is what should happen if/when the user submits a valid destination, but an invalid campaign or partner ID. If the correct response is that the user should see an error, then all of the above is still valid. If, on the other hand, the correct response is that the user should be silently taken to the destination page anyway, then the campaign ID is really a query string parameter, not a part of the resource. Perhaps some partners wouldn't like being given a URL with a question mark in it, but from a purely REST point of view, I think that's the right approach, if the campaign ID's validity does not determine where the user ends up. In this case, the URL would be:
"campaign/{destination}",
...and you would add a query string parameter with the campaign ID.
I realize that I haven't given you a definite answer to your question. The trouble is that most of this rests on business considerations which you are probably aware of, but I'm certainly not. So I'm more trying to cover the philosophy of a REST-ful URL, rather than attempting to explain your business to you. :)
I think the URL rewriting is getting out of hand a little bit lately. Not everything belongs to the URL. After all, a URL is supposed to describe a resource that can be searched for, discovered or manipulated and it seems to me that at least the partner ID and the custom fields from above are not part of the resource.
Not to mention that that at some point you would like to actually keep the partner ID constant across multiple campaigns and that means that it is now orthogonal to the particular places they need to visit. If you keep these as parameters, you will allow your partners to access uniformly multiple resources on your website, while still reliably identifying themselves, so you can track their participation in any of your campaigns.
It looks like you've covered all of your bases. The only suggestion I have is to change
{custom}
to
{*custom}
That way, if you ever need to accept further parameters, you don't have to take the chance that old URLs will get a 404. For example:
If you have a URL that looks like:
campaign/PR/SO/123
and you decide in the future that you would like to accept a fourth and fifth parameter:
campaign/PR/SO/123/blah/foo
then the first URL will still be valid, because you're using a wildcard character in {*custom}. "blah/foo" would be passed as a string to your action. To get those extra two parameters, you would simply split the custom argument in your action by '/'. Add some friendly error handling if they don't exist and you've successfully changed the amount of information you can receive with a campaign URL without completely breaking URLs already in the wild.
Why not use URL encoded variables instead of routes? They're a lot more flexible - you can add any new features in the future while still maintaining 100% backwards compatibility. Admittedly, it's a little more trouble to type manually, but if there's all those parameters anyway, it's already no picnic.
http://mysite.com/page?campaign=1&dest=products&pid=15&cid=25
To me, this is much more indicative of what is really going on. Using paths implies a that a resource exists at that location. But really you're just providing a web service with various parameters, and this model captures that much more clearly. And in the future, you can add more parameters effortlessly. You can also default parameters if they are missing without messing anything up.
Not sure of the code in ASP, but it should be trivial to implement.
I think I'd look at doing it the way that SO does it's questions.
"campaign/{campaign-id}/friendly-name-of-campaign"
Create a mapping in your database when the campaign is created that associates all the data you need with an automatically generated id. The friendly name could be assigned basically the same way as a question is on SO -- by the user -- but you could also have an approval process that makes sure that it meets your requirements and is distinct from any existing campaign names. Your tracking company can track by the id and you can correlate that with your associated data with a simple look up.
What you have looks good for your needs. The other posts here have good points. But may not be suitable for you. One thing that you could consider with future proofing your links is to put a version number somewhere in there.
"campaign/{version}/{destination}/{partnerid}/{campaignid}/{custom}"
This way if you decide to completely change your format you can up the version to 2.0 (or whatever) and still keep track of the old links coming in.
I would do
/c/{destination}/{partnerid}/{campaignid}/?customvar=s
You should think about the hierarchy of the first parameters, you already got that managed quite well. Only if there's a hierarchy path segments should be used.
From your description, destination seems to be the broadest parameter, partnerid only works with destination, and campaingid is specific to a partner.
When you really need to add custom parameters I would go for query variables (they are not forbidden in REST), because these are not part of the hierarchy.
You also shouldn't try to be too RESTful here. After all, it's for a campaign and for redirecting to a final resource. So the URL you want to design here is not really a specific resource in the terms of REST.
Create an URL called http://mysite.com/gateway
Return an HTML form, tell your partners to fill in the form and POST it. Redirect based on the form values.
You could easily provide your partners with the javascript to do the GET and POST. Should be trivial.
The most important thing i have learned about REST URL´s thats usually burried deep in some book or article:
The URL should point to a resource and the following ?querystring should have all the scoping information needed. DONT mix those two or you will have a design thats very hard to work with.
Other then that i fully agree with Craig Stuntz