Adding .html to URLs

[Tyssen]

I'm looking at implementing a CMS on an existing site which has very good SEO ranking position so I don't want to mess with any URLs but want to know if Processwire is the right fit for it.

All the site's URLs end in .htm and are one level below the home page even though there's two sections where the pages are accessed from dropdown menus so it would make sense from a structure point of view that they be set up like:

Section 1

- Page 1.a

- Page 1.b

Section 2

- Page 2.a

- Page 2.b

but with URLs like

section1-pageA.htm

section1-pageB.htm

section2-pageA.htm

section2-pageB.htm

Would I be able to do this with Processwire? Does it just require some creative .htaccess writing?

[Pete]

Well you could get around the .htm but by permanently redirecting the old URLs to the new ones via htaccess, but I'm not sure how you would include the category name in each page unless you actually named them manually to include it.

I would personally set them all up as /category/pagename/ and then simply do a 301 redirect in htaccess from the old ones to the new ones and that should be fine. You're telling browsers and search engines "hey, that content is over here now" and nobody sees an error page so SEO should remain in tact.

[Joss]

Just for interest, how old is the existing site? Haven't seen an .htm ending in quite some time.

[SiNNuT]

PW supports periods in page names. Page name basically dictates the url from which a page is accessable. So you could just manually add .htm on the end of the page name (on the settings tab). Remember to turn off the trailing slash setting on the corresponding template(s).

More info on: http://processwire.com/talk/topic/45-url-schema/

If you would like PW to automatically handle adding .htm or whatever you like i'm sure this would be a fairly simple module. I'm sure someone on the forum could help out with that.

[DaveP]

Well you could get around the .htm but by permanently redirecting the old URLs to the new ones via htaccess, but I'm not sure how you would include the category name in each page unless you actually named them manually to include it.

I would personally set them all up as /category/pagename/ and then simply do a 301 redirect in htaccess from the old ones to the new ones and that should be fine. You're telling browsers and search engines "hey, that content is over here now" and nobody sees an error page so SEO should remain in tact.

I'm with Pete here - there comes a time to review old url structures and change them, otherwise you'll be trying to support them for ever. Antti's redirect module is your best friend in this case.

[typ9]

Thanks, Dave - that module helped me to solve another problem: redirecting the old .html-files to the new PW-directories/pages. Perfect!

[Wanze]

Depending on the amount of pages, I'd use Antti's excellent redirect module.

However, if you have hunderts or more of pages with the same "format", you could add a pemanent redirect in your .htaccess.

Let's say you want to rewrite your old pages "section1-pageA.htm" to Pw-Urls, which would look like this: "/section1/pageA/"

This is easy if your sections AND pages have the same name in Pw, then one or two lines in the .htaccess are enough:

#Add those redirects after the RewriteBase 
RewriteRule ^(section1)-(.*)\.htm$ /$1/$2/ [R,L]
RewriteRule ^(section2)-(.*)\.htm$ /$1/$1/ [R,L]

Not tested ;-)

[Tyssen]

I'm with Pete here - there comes a time to review old url structures and change them, otherwise you'll be trying to support them for ever. Antti's redirect module is your best friend in this case.

This site ranks in the top 5 for nearly all the search terms relevant to it. URLs ending with .htm are still valid and always will be and don't have any negative SEO impact, so at the moment, the only argument in favour of changing them is that it will make working with default CMS behaviour easier. That might save the client a few dollars in development now, but the SEO impact if rankings were to drop could cost them a lot more.

To answer Pete that SEO should remain intact, in theory that's the case, but in reality, it's not. 301 redirects aren't guaranteed to retain all the SEO strength that existed before the redirects were put in place. Any changes in URL, whether 301 redirected or not, will have an impact on SEO, even if it only for a short while, so it's not really an option for this site which has such a strong position and they don't want to alter that.

It's possible that I can get away with a certain manual amount of setting pages URLs in the control panel as the client isn't likely to add new pages too often. I may also be able to use the redirect module to redirect the new URLs to the old ones (rather than the other way around) so thanks for the suggestions everyone.

[Pete]

If they won't edit the old pages you could even leave them in place and be clever with your navigation so new URLs are done the new way and old ones the old way. .htaccess only sends requests to index.php if the file doesn't exist so leaving the old pages there could be an option.

I see your point about not wanting to take a chance with SEO, though the one time I did this I saw no drop, but it wasn't like the site was high up in terms of SEO in the first place.