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

https://www.abramillar.com/2018/02/12/urls-maximum-length-long-best/

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?

https://moz.com/blog/15-seo-best-practices-for-structuring-urls

yariplus

https://www.google.com/search?q=nodebb+prefer+shorter+url