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SEO Friendly URL's with a /

I’m maintaining a webshop and would like to use seo friendly urls.
I have everything set and it works which is nice.
But the webshop is about tires and i have a few tires using a / in the name like this:

1000/50R25

As it isn’t possible (well i assume?) to use this name in the url what would be the best way to go to make a nice readable url which works correct.

My url looks now like this:

http://example.nl/TireRetreading/Rounding/Agricultural?product_id=1601

Note: I can’t remove or replace it with another character.

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2

Answers


  1. 0

    First a disclaimer: no one will ever have a definitive answer of what is or isn’t SEO friendly. That said, here’s some hint.

    The direct approach is to url_encode each part of the friendly URL. In your example, you can decide that an URL is defined as http://example.nl/tires/<vendor>/<measure> so you url encode each part and obtain url like http://example.nl/tires/Afronden%20Landbouw/1000%2F50R25. This are a bit more SEO friendly, but definetly not readable by users. This can penalize you when choosing between multiple results in SERP.

    My suggestion is to replace each “page breaking” character with a dash (not underscores, since is a non-breaking character) and obtain a better url like
    http://example.nl/tires/Afronden-Landbouw/1000-50R25.

    Notice that I haven’t placed the product ID in the URL; if you find a way of mapping URL to product without ID is much better, but if can’t is not a big issue.

    Then you need to think carefully about “categories”. When defining sub-path, think at each level as an “explorable category”, with nested product. This imply that valid URL could be:

    • http://example.nl/tires/ (search through all tires);
    • http://example.nl/tires/Afronden-Landbouw/ (list of tires made by Afronden-Landbouw)
    • http://example.nl/tires/Afronden-Landbouw/1000-50R25 (a single model)
    • http://example.nl/tires/Afronden-Landbouw/1000-50R25/1601 (a single model, with explicit product ID)

    With this organization you use a meaningful sub-path, search engines like Google, will have a better “understanding” of your websites and can provide better result to the user. Also, some advanced users can play with your sub-path and get meaningful resources.

    Last and NOT least, always always always set redirect from the old URL to the new one. You can start with 302 redirect for testing, and then set a definitive 301 redirect. If you don’t use redirect you will loose ALL your reputation so far… which is not SEO at all.

    Happy SEO

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  2. 0

    since not much details provided on how the seo friendly urls is done, so I’m assuming all the seo friendly url is like this:

    http://domain.com/product/tires/michelin/size/205/40/17Z

    and assuming you have product.php file mapped to read the request. you can simply have some code to read the REQUEST_URI

    $uri  = explode('/', trim($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], '/'));

    and you may get the value from the $uri

    $page = $uri[0];
$product = $uri[1];
$manufacturer = $uri[2];
$option = $uri[3];
$tire_size = implode("/" array($uri[4], $uri[5], $uri[6]));

    Hope you get the idea, maybe can share a bit more on how you achieve those friendly seo urls, so that other might have different ideas.

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