URL schema

[Frank Vèssia]

@Ryan You are right but i'm fighting with my seo expert and he is also right about little improvements...He knows his job and in many years of work with him i have to admin that the results talk...look at this forum url... maybe some people don't like .html but if i can have little advantages from mr. G, i like too.

About selectors, i will use the .html only to "final" pages, i mean pages that will never have children and that i will never use for selectors so this is not a problem like can be for categories (in my case).

[deandre212]

As for SEO, using URL extension has no direct impact on rankings, an URL extension just makes it clear both to a user and a search bot whether this is a page or subdirectory. Which only makes it useful for static pages. All you have to do is add 301 redirect. I personally see no benefit into using a URL extension.

[ryan]

Sevarf: I forgot something on the previous commit (it wasn't allowing periods in the URL name). That is fixed, so if you grab the latest, it'll let you use ".html" with your page names (or any page name with periods in it for that matter).

Regarding SEO and .html, of course listen to your expert. I don't claim to have the title of SEO expert, so take what I say with a grain of salt. But SEO is fundamentally intertwined with all the work I do, and has been for more than 10 years. I'm responsible for maintaining dozens of sites at top rankings with very competitive terms over the long term. My experience may be different from others, but what I've learned is that any time you are tweaking details with the intention of tricking (or optimizing) Google into thinking your page is something it's not, you are asking for trouble. It's arguable whether using an .html extension falls into that category since it can be purely stylistic. But your SEO expert is suggesting you do it in order to exploit some apparent weakness in Google's algorithm (which I don't believe exists). An SEO strategy that dips into these considerations it not a good long term strategy, and is focused on the wrong things, in my opinion. However, I don't claim to have all the answers, nor do I know anyone at Google, so I'm not suggesting you change your strategy. Just be wary of anything founded in quick fixes or algorithm exploits. Unless the need calls for black hat, in which case we'd probably be talking about how to use ProcessWire to automate creating thousands of Youtube and Facebook accounts. That will be a fun guide to write.

Regarding this forum's use of .html -- SMF is not a good example. I love this forum software, but have a look at the SMF code sometime, and you'll see what I mean. In addition, view the source on this page and you'll see a populated meta keywords tag... they make a great forum, but I wouldn't trust them with my client's SEO. Though I do have to give them credit for adding a required, difficult-to-modify (hashed) backlink to their site in the footer. I had to use PHP's buffer functions just to change it to a rel=nofollow.

Adam: I don't want a site-wide slash setting because template API code has to consider the slash setting. I want to have a site-wide expected default (of having a slash) so that there is a known playing field for code examples, prepared templates, etc. If someone wants to change it, then they can do so with the knowledge that they may have to consider it in their code on a template-by-template basis.

[apeisa]

I do want to make sure people have the flexibility to do it any way they want, so I think that's what we've got now (they can set it according to their preference). I've been meaning to add this slashes setting, so figured now was the time with this most recent request.

I actually like convention over configuration. When system is flexible like pw is, then it actually helps everyone that there is some common rules that cannot be changed. I am not sure how I feel about this one. Nice to know that there is ability to remove slashes or add .html to pages, but I am pretty sure that I never have to use these settings.

Too many options = confusion.

And have to agree with Ryan about SEO. Using time and energy for details like this won't be good tactic on the long run. Keep your markup and urls clean & coherent, concentrate on your content (there you might wanna analyze how people search for the content like yours and make sure to mention those phrases - as a natural part of your writing) and get the word out of your content (to get incoming links). You'll be fine.