I enabled the clean url feature of Drupal and added the pathauto module to have static urls which are more Search Engine friendly.

The problem is with Pagination Module , the url for the different pages of the same article are dynamic, for example: mysite.com/article-name?page =1

Is there a way to turn the pagionation created url to be static. I understand search engines ignore anything after the "?" and hence this can result into duplicate urls with which could get rejected by the SE

Any way to add that feature?

Comments

mundanity’s picture

mundanity commented
Status: Active » Closed (works as designed)

Hello!

Unfortunately this isn't really doable. There are a few reasons for this. First off, search engines will look at query strings now (anything after the ?). They didn't use to back in the day but that's changed now.

The technical reasons are that clean URL's don't work with the Path / PathAuto module. ie, http://yoursite.com/clean-page/1, or http://yoursite.com/clean-page/page/1, etc... don't map to http://yoursite.com/clean-page.

This basically means it's not possible to pick up the necessary information to get to the correct page using that syntax.

A possible alternative is using a syntax like http://yoursite.com/clean-page#1, or http://yoursite.com/clean-page#page1, etc... but that requires javascript to handle the pagination, which is not necessarily ideal.

Until Drupal core allows for paths to ignore extra parameters (which I doubt is a very pressing issue, as that will likely involve more processing time just for this one issue), I don't forsee this being doable with that syntax in the near future, unfortunately.

Avatar’s picture

Avatar commented

let me get this correctly, does your first statement mean that anything after the "?" are readable now by Google? Does this mean it's no longer a problem for SE and the problem of duplicate URL's is no longer an issue? ..or did I get something wrong

Thanks for your efforts by the way :)

mundanity’s picture

mundanity commented

HI there,

That's correct, google has been reading ? links for quite awhile now without issue. The only time it matters as far as I know is if two resources point to the exact same page (ie, affiliate links such as ?referral=someid or ?referral=someotherid). In that case, it's better to do a 301 Redirect to the actual page.

For unique resources (such as ?page=1 ?page=2) which will be serving up different content that will be indexed appropriately.

shadcn’s picture

shadcn commented

"That's correct, google has been reading ? links for quite awhile now without issue."

mundanity, do you have any link or article confirming this?

thanks

Avatar’s picture

Avatar commented

Wydle: I checked it too and here it is : http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/09/dynamic-urls-vs-stati...

In fact, Google seems to recommend to leave dynamic url's as they are. This is confusing me since I already rewrote them , and this confusion seems to be shared by some of those who commented on Google's article. I am leaving my urls as they are since it makes them rich in keywords and the pagination thing is no longer an issue,.... thanks mundanity for the info. :)

shadcn’s picture

shadcn commented

Great Article. Thank You Avatar

shadcn’s picture

shadcn commented

Great Article. Thank You Avatar