How to Customize the URL? Would Prefer Shorter URL

[srinik]

Hi!

Is there any way to cut down the url permalink?

Currently, the url of any post is being displayed as http://domain.com/%postname%

However, it leads to a long url structure.

Can it be limited? Or can we have a custom url where one can choose the words to be in the url?

The present system gives me a long url that has stop words too.

Instead of long 100+ characters in a URL, I would like to have short url.

How can I make it?

Hope I'm not complicating the things.

[julian]

Everything in the slug is optional, actually, so while the canonical URL to this topic is https://community.nodebb.org/topic/11181/how-to-customize-the-url-would-prefer-shorter-url, you can access it by going to https://community.nodebb.org/topic/11181

If you want to change the slug, you will have to edit the "slug" property in the topic hash (so for this topic, it would be topic:11181). At this time we do not have the capability to update the topic slug via the UI.

[srinik]

@julian Thank for the response.

Hope this issue will be addressed by the development of some plugin as it addresses SEO aspect too.

[julian]

In what way? URL length doesn't correspond to any increase or drop in search engine ranking. Having a slug is better than not having one, I'd wager.

[Chilsion]

@julian I think it would be very useful to allow the admin to choose a permalink structure like:

default
/$(category) + /$(category)/$(topic-id)-$(topic-title).html

[srinik]

@chilsion

I agree with your inputs. Implementation of the custom permalink structure would be a great idea.

[greenmoon]

@julian actually it does impact the search engine ranking. Recommended maximum length for URLs is 75 characters. -> https://moz.com/community/q/url-length-3

Also with forum that support multiple languages, the Japanese or Russian urls become very unreadable with
non-English characters in URL e.g. forum.example.com/topic/000/ウェブゲームのウィンドウ表示が崩れる is read by search engines as forum.example.com/topic/000/ %E3%82%A6%E3%82%A7%E3%83%96%E3%82%B2%E3%83%BC%E3%83%A0%E3%81%AE%E3%82%A6%E3%82%A3%E3%83%B3%E3%83%89%E3%82%A6%E8%A1%A8%E7%A4%BA%E3%81%8C%E5%B4%A9%E3%82%8C%E3%82%8B

Do URLs Have a Maximum Length? And How Long is Best? – Abra Millar

Most popular CMSs allow you to edit the URL of your page. They'll also automatically generate one for you too - but these tend to be a bit long.

Abra Millar - Digital Marketing Consultant (www.abramillar.com)

[julian]

@greenmoon I would hesitate to consider a user contributed answer on a Q&A site as authoritative. Something said with confidence does not a fact make.

Remember that we have no idea how any search engine promotes or demotes ranking for each individual site. They may use url length as a factor, or they may not. It may be very important, or not important at all.

Also it would be a little hyperbolic of Google to penalize sites with longer URLs, as AMP urls are regularly way over 75 characters, but it certainly wouldn't be the first time...

[greenmoon]

@julian thanks for your input. Maybe you'll find this article from one of the most known SEO guru more authoritative then?

15 SEO BEST PRACTICES for Structuring URLs [URL Best Practices]

URL BEST PRACTICES - It's been a long time since we covered one of the most fundamental building blocks of SEO--the structure of domain names and URLs--and I think it's high time to revisit.

Moz (moz.com)

[yariplus]

nodebb prefer shorter url - Google Search

(www.google.com)