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Author Topic: Automate url rewrites removing SEF plugin  (Read 7510 times)

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Walkinman

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Automate url rewrites removing SEF plugin
« on: December 25, 2013, 03:14:54 am »

Hey Folks,

I'm thinking more and more I need to drop the SEF plugin .... google seems to continually downgrade my rankings since I installed this plugin a few years ago, and it clearly has a number of problems, written about in the plugin thread. My question and concern is if I do uninstall it, is there a simple, easy way to have the urls that exist now (with the plugin operating) rewritten or redirected to the urls that will exist once I uninstall it .. I can manually write 301s for the albums and categories, but to do that for every image page would be a disaster.

Obviously I could ignore that, and redo a new sitemap, but  google will forever try to find those urls in its own index, until it has 301s to tell it otherwise (even WITH those 301s google still seems unable to move on).

Thank you.

Cheers

Carl
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Αndré

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Re: Automate url rewrites removing SEF plugin
« Reply #1 on: December 27, 2013, 01:53:12 pm »

Just keep the .htaccess file as-is should be enough.
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Walkinman

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Re: Automate url rewrites removing SEF plugin
« Reply #2 on: December 28, 2013, 12:57:04 am »

Hey André

Oh, that's neat. So you mean if I uninstall the plugin, andy link I have to, say,

http://www.skolaiimages.com/stock/thumbnails-109-Gates-of-the-Arctic-National-Park-Photos.html

or

http://www.skolaiimages.com/stock/displayimage-109-5969-Caribu-antlers-Gates-of-the-Arctic-Nationa.html

will not get a 404, and the spider/user will be directed to the original dynamic url?

I just want to verify before I do anything, as I'm concerned that even deactivating the plugin, if I reactivate it it may not work as it does now.

Thanks man

Cheers

Carl
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Αndré

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Re: Automate url rewrites removing SEF plugin
« Reply #3 on: December 29, 2013, 12:37:33 pm »

As far as I know the Coppermine plugin itself changes the common thumbnails.php?album=123 links to thumbnails-123.html and the .htaccess file retranslate them, so Coppermine can understand them.
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Walkinman

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Re: Automate url rewrites removing SEF plugin
« Reply #4 on: December 30, 2013, 03:05:39 am »

Correct .. but once I uninstall that plugin, links around the web, hand-coded links on my website and on my 2nd website going to the

/stock/thumbnails-109-Gates-of-the-Arctic-National-Park-Photos.html

will automatically be redirected to the original dynamic url
stock/thumbnails.php?album=109

That would seem odd, as once the plugin is deactivated, how would cpg know what that original link is pointing to?

I'm just a bit confused, sorry.

Thanks

Carl
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gmc

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Re: Automate url rewrites removing SEF plugin
« Reply #5 on: December 30, 2013, 04:22:25 am »

Think of it as 2 parts to the plugin... The code running in cpg that replaces the normal cpg URLs with SEF versions... And the .htaccess file the install also creates that translates the SEF URLs back to native cpg format...

When uninstalling this plugin you will have a choice to retain the .htaccess... Retaining it will allow any saved/referenced SEF URLs to still be translated to native cpg format.

The plugin will no longer generate the SEF URLs of course - but any references, user bookmarks, search engine links in the SEF format will continue to work (as long as the category and album numbers are unchanged for the referenced items of course.)
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Walkinman

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Re: Automate url rewrites removing SEF plugin
« Reply #6 on: December 30, 2013, 07:58:58 am »

Ahhhh .. cool, thanks Greg. That explains it well.

As part of that question, then, this could be a good thing to do. One of the reasons I am thinking of removing the plugin (the only reason, really) is that because it leads to a lot of incorrect urls that don't get redirected, but show up as different urls hosting the same content. Google doesn't seem to formally announce when they ping people for duplicate content, that I can tell, but I know google has crawled incorrect urls and indexed them as actual urls.

An example

skolaiimages.com

/stock/thumbnails-25-Wrangell-St-Elias-National-Park-Photos.html

will display just the same as

/stock/thumbnails-25-Wrangell-St-Elias-Photos.html

and so on.

It does show rel=canonical in the header, so maybe this isn't an issue too much? I'm not sure, but there is another person as well who's just lost a lot of google rankings for his cpg pages with this plugin, and has run into the same problem. I suspect it is an issue with google, but I'm not sure.

The plugin can definitely lead to countless 404s if it starts appending characters to the end of the url.

Anyway, that's great to know. If I do deactivate it, just leave the htaccess in place and things should be fine.

Thanks so much,

Cheers

Carl
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gmc

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Re: Automate url rewrites removing SEF plugin
« Reply #7 on: December 31, 2013, 03:17:48 am »

Actually even /stock/thumbnails-25-Any-Content-Here.html will display the same page...
The .htaccess doesn't need anything beyond the 25 to translate this URL to /stock/thumbnails.php?album=25

How/why different URLs for the same picture are being generated, I don't know - don't know enough about the SEF plugin to answer - but any variation generated - or someone's link that has a typo (as long as it is after the 25...) - would all work.

If that helps...
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Walkinman

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Re: Automate url rewrites removing SEF plugin
« Reply #8 on: December 31, 2013, 03:52:34 am »

Hey greg

Thanks .. yeah, any variation at all .... typos cause errors, and a couple of times I changed a page, and google still crawls the old pages, etc. So it's not the plugin that's generating them, but once someone else creates them, or I change something, the incorrect urls don't produce 404s and are not redirected to the correct ones, and so on. There's a longer section in the thread about the plugin as well.. someone once posted a link somewhere that joined 2 urls together ... and Baidu crawled my site forEVER, looking for urls that led nowhere and so on ... it was a disaster .. CPU usage went thru the roof ... all rescued by a single line of code that redirected anything ending in .htmlhttpanything got a 410.

Anyway, I appreciate it. I'm tweaking a few other things, and they may start to patch things up with me and google ..we used to be so close, now google hates me. Hardly even speaks to me. Dropping the plugin doesn't seem like such a potential nightmare now that I understand how it will work on uninstall.

Thanks

Cheers

Carl
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