Very, very good points. Absolutely agree. But you have to remember that it is Joomla. SO it will add one or 2 /-/-/ to the beginning no matter what. We may although make it shorter.

You know that we have routing system that allow everyone to correct routing and select it in global config. So we may add some routing like shorten.php for those who likes shorter URLs.

hello because in you case you remove catégory identification in url , but category can be usefull for ecommerce website

but it is right , current url is too long, it is not good if google work too many to index articles,

great idea is to add noindex option to avoid duplicate content

yes but a plugin for sh404 would fix these problems

joomla is not so seo friendly than wordpress, i can not have good ranking with Cobalt ( and the others joomla component) , my wordpress website has a good ranking

i think a sh404 plugin could help

Thank you Sergey, and Clowride, for great comments and openness to work on the issue.

BTW, this is a bigger problem then I thought.

I made an Experiment 2 days ago about how you get judged based on the appearance of URL. I will share this experience below.

P.S. Sorry to repeat myself, I am NOT interested for any 3-rd party extra SEO scripts. It takes databases, calls redirects and kills serious projects. My project based on Resources ended up in a trash because it is not capable to handle too many calls to database and too many requests on a page (after a certain number of articles published, other plugins and customizations added).

Since this is the beginning of the Cobalt, and there is a time to start it on the right foot, I am interested to get maximum leverage out of Cobalt itself.

I know I can replace the word “item” in the URL, …. That is wonderful… but.. this is unnecessary piece of URL at all.

Too much fat on the URL , very obese URL - that is a death sentence from Google and from users. Users????

Lately I asked a few people on the Skype click on the link on to my site built with Resources and they were AFRAID to click on the link. The reason, they explain – ther are TOO MANY slashes in the URL .

Hackers, spammers and Identity theft known to have too many slashes in the URL.

If URL is hard to read- it is hard to trust.

People are AFRAID.

If they are your consumers and judge you based on URL in their e-mail – good luck to you! You just lost a customer! Actually you lost hundreds customers and lost marketing budget!

Bottom line:

With Cobalt you build your site project, it is NOT goona to be cheap...and it is gonna to be extremely powerful....and the Cobalt URL structure is going to kill trust to your site.

Is it what we are looking for?

That is the buttom line.

Thank you Sergey for being open to new ideas. I know you and your team are very talented innovators.

You have no limitst of what you want and you can create.

i must say, i agree Alex Martin, urls need to improved

My project based on Resources ended up in a trash because it is not capable to handle too many calls to database and too many requests on a page (after a certain number of articles published, other plugins and customizations added).

I am very sorry about that. I know how many time and money you have spent for this project. Please contact me personally and I'll make deal to you for Cobalt.

I have some questions. You know that URL have to have minimum number of parameters or slashes in Joomla. If you want to make it shorter you have to use DB which is not very practical.

First I want to say that as I understand we are talking only about record list URLs and record URLs. Right? because other URLs like options, moderators, category manager, .... does not matter how the looks because they have nothing to do with site promotion.

For our urls we have to have at least

/itemid/key

Where Item id is the menu element slug and key is an identifier of URLs

Then number of parameters would be

sectionid = 1, 5, 45

view_what = created, favorited, commented, ...

user_id = 42

cat_id = 5

ucat_id = 3

Please indicate which one I can leave as number and with I have to use slug? For example

cars/list/5/42/3/created.html

This is actually

itemid/urlkey/section_id/user_id/ucat_id/view_what

but the came may looks like this

cars/list/5/42-admin/3-electric/created.html

To create Router that would fully fit what you need I need examples of how you want URLs to looks.

basically : www.*****.com/5 -name of category / name of article

or www.*****.com/date format if google news numbering / name of article

or www.*****.com/5 / name of article

but anyway keywords need to be in url (cf : seomorz)

according a test form a seo agency with these url :

******.fr/lille

******.fr/hurloubu-lille

******/hurloubu/lille

******hurloubu/hourloubu-lille

google has prefered ********.fr/lille** based on the same h1 tags (h1 / h2 lack in cobalt, please fix asap)

Sergey, it is great to have your personal attention. That shows you really care for your clients. I give you high stars ranking for the customer care; you are the best caring developer out there.

**Here is my short answer: **

The most important part is Article Title in the URL. This is the only part and nothing else. It should be closer to the domain name as possible. Preferably it should be in the 1-st position, and other identifiers should follow after the article title in the URL). The best part if all identifiers can be mashed up into one like A1B2C3D4 ( and that is not possible …..most likely…)

The other identifiers I prefer as numbers and shown only to webmasters/developers.

End of the short answer.

To save your time , Sergey, you don’t have to read content below. Below I explain my answers with many “why’s” and also I put some basic most important information on what Google bots love to eat.

**##1 Explanation: **

In my project users create content and they want to have maximum control over it.

The Users that create content should not depend on the factors they cannot control. They control Article Tile and Aliases only.

They do not control menu/module / type/ category/

Do I care about Created, View, commented, Categories, Subcategories, Community, votes, and other words in URL? – I consider it all as a “fat particles” that makes URL heavy obese and needed for programmers and webmasters only.

All these words must be shrieked to the shortest possible and replaced with alphanumeric ids such as A1 Ab 1a and other combinations. Numbers are the safest here.

The Ideal for content consumers is not to see any of the “fat” parts of the URL at all. Why a consumer clicking on the link should see a word “Created” . WTF?!!! Or – item? WTF???

Notice what Resource adds into the Browser Page Title :

Notice What Resources fetch into the Facebook - Type, Category - all these "fat" particles that confuses consumers:

Professional content sites use slim and lean urls , like in the Ezinearticles.com

(Disclaimer: I am not a programmer, I don’t know how the hell it works, I am power user. My gues it uses some masking or database technology. I have no clue.)

Example: http://ezinearticles.com/?Summer-Time-Made-Easy-With-Self-Storage& ;id=6026675

This is a slim, lean and muscle URL great for SEO.

( don’t tel any one please I need extra SEO component. )

Consumers should see Article Title in the URL, nothing else. If there is a fat particles – put it at the end only.

(Actually I like the fact that Cobalt lets Author of the article control and change aliases . Really useful for the article author to customize Title and how it appears in the URL. For example – I use same keyword in the article title multiple times but I want the same keyword in the url only once) and not for consumers, not for the users, not for search engines.

**##2 Google bots favorite food: **

Some factors that kills or improves SEO and ranking :

**1) **How far the keyword from the beginning of the domain.

The importance of the Keyword in url is more of it is close to the domain name. Than farther keyword from end of the domain name the weaker role it plays. Usually Keyword is what User - yes a USER should control and not set by module/menu type or category names. ( This is the situation when content is created by users , in my project) The Keyword should come from Title of the article

2) The Keyword in the URL should be aligned with the Article Title and ( and also with Meta tags as Description, but the congruence between article title as H1 tag and Browser Title is at the most importance )

3) Title MUST be H1 tag.

Just for information: The best result for SEO if you have H tags in this order: H1, H2, H3, and not as H3, H1 H2. This is proven by testing and experiments. But the Title MUST be H1 tag and nothing else

4) Browser Page Title (what shown above the url address bar in the browser) Is the MOST significant factor for SEO . Period. It is as significant as the keyword in the domain name. Nothing bits it.

Resources fetch a lot of extra into that line (text from type, categories/ sections, created/ menu/ module) and this extra fat is diminishing / lowering factor for SEO. Too many words in the Browser Title NOT related to the content of the page confuses Search Engine The page Title in a browser should have ONLY Title of the page and nothing else.

5) The FIRST paragraph – what Search engine reads as the Beginning of the content on the page plays another significant role.

If first information that engines consume on the page is : username, votes, and other descriptive information around Avatar, then – you miss the optimization points.

The best food for search engine boots here should be nothing else but Article Title and First paragraph content optimized with keywords.

The first paragraph keywords=article H1 Title=Browser Page Title

This congruency gives more points for SEO automatically.

6) Description meta Tag. – This is what Google Panda is about. If you want to overcome Panda slap, use UNIQUE Description – it shows up in the SERPS – search engine results description.

7) Keywords must be in order of importance, no more than 5 and must be in meta Description/ Article H1 title/ Browser Page Title/ URL Aliace/ First paragraph

These are the most critical factors, and I don’t mean to lecture here any one. It is only minimum that relates to Cobalt and My project.

o, here is correct image of how Facebook fetching words fom the Browser Title of the page:

Yes, on the Image above , Facebook fetch from resources: oleg-Landing Pages-White-Read

The word SHORTCUT - is the only what consumers neeed here - it is the title.

http://yoast.com/wordpress-seo-url-permalink/

That was long reading but i have read it all. Very valuable notes. In our road map to advance Cobalt and SEO. We will definitely keep in mind all your notes. Aтв we will think a way for user to finally control all this things.

@Alex Martin a question ? Title MUST be H1 tag. title of page or title of article ?!?

H1 - if you select to show title field on published article - it should be published as H1. That means the title field itself on the submission form must be formatted H1.

If you do not show title field on published article, start your content with typing the title and make it H1.

Hello, when I first came across Mighty Resources 1.5 about 2 years ago I tested it alongside other CCK's and went for it because it was just the best and what I needed. During the project I found an issue with not so great URL's (item, id's in url)...btw I think every CCK has them.

I searched and found AceSEF with plugin for Mighty Resources and it worked great. I was able to eliminate everything from url and kept only domain/category/subcategory/subcategory/.../article (without id's). I did travel website and I think there was nothing wrong to have such a long URL's because they were nicely structured and users were able to see from url where they are on the site. And my position in Google got better.

In the plugin config I was able to:

• choose url for article and category from title or alias

eliminate category and article ID from url

exclude categories and display only articles in url

display all categories or just the last one that article was in

google news numbering (article id or article date)

skip menu in url so that it starts with MR category

Now, 2 years later I'm rebuilding the site again with Cobalt and will again use MijoSEF (successor of AceSEF), but have to wait for version for Joomla 3. I find it great adition to Cobalt's URL's and think that Cobalt should keep focus on their great functionality and posibilities as CCK. Hope there's nothing wrong that I mentioned another extension for Joomla here.

Regards

Cobalt should keep focus on their great functionality and posibilities as CCK

Finally! Thank you. This is what we try to do. ANd we want to let SEF developers to do their job. :)

Exactly and you are welcome:)...SEF is in my opinion another story! And by adding the SEF component my project wasn't killed, it was probably better. And site was working great...still is.

I hope Mijosef or Acesef will make a cobalt integration, but about for SH404 , it is developper to make integration (i posted somewhere a answer from sh404 developper to my mail)

MijoSEF already has extension for Cobalt7