Permalink related question

[Chromaniac]

The permalinks that are attached to each post (on time stamp) are connected with their links relative to the thread at the moment.

And I assume these are provided to let user share links to individual posts in a thread.

In a large forum there would be cases when threads are merged/split/moved... these links shared at external sources might not remain accurate (though you might already be using redirects to their new position on the forum making the point of this thread invalid but still...).

My worthless suggestion is to link the permalinks with absolute links instead. These links are already used in the news feed section.

I am going to post sample links after posting this thread. I hope I have managed to explain my trivial point here!

 

[Dean]

No, I mean that if you had post p1 in thread t1 and merged t1 into t2, the permalink you had for p1 would point to t1, which no longer exists.

A user following a link from elsewhere on another forum to p1 in t1 would see what?

If it goes to t2 that would be ok.
If it goes to a 'invalid link' that would not be good.

If it would be possible in those circumstances to use the http://xenforo.com/community/posts/51860 that would be ideal assuming it was p=51860.

If ( http://xenforo.com/community/threads/permalink-related-question.3417/#post-51860)
else ( http://xenforo.com/community/posts/51860)

Maybe I don't understand?

edit: that last hotlink is not working for some reason, hopefully the intent of what I typed is clear.

 

[Mike]

A user following a link from elsewhere on another forum to p1 in t1 would see what?

It goes to t2 provided you setup a redirect when you do the merge (it's an option when doing it). Otherwise, it's no different from deleting the thread. But it can't take you to the post - well, it may, but it depends on the circumstances. The server doesn't get the stuff after the #.

 

[Chromaniac]

this has been the reason why i was looking for an actual permalink for each post

anyways. this thread was originally conceived from a thought that we should have a tiny link for each post for easy sharing because forum links can become way too long in some cases.

i guess we would have to accept the compromise to save the search engine spiders from dancing around on the server.

i was considering suggesting to put a nofollow link on the permalinks as these links are not necessarily aimed for indexing.

but no follow would not prevent the spiders from processing the links. it is just designed to stop the flow of pagerank.

 

[Enigma]

Hmmm, here's my take on this.

Since posts/123 is a 301 redirect to threads/title.456/#post123, there will be no search engine penalty or confusion—in terms of pagerank, duplicate content, or anything else—regarding the link or spidering it. Thus, there is really no reason not to use it and avoid the edge case of broken links when posts are moved. The downside is the fact that you're linking to a URL that redirects and is not in fact the canonical URL, which I don't really like. To solve that problem, I would have no problem just displaying the post alone at posts/123 as the canonical permalink. It will cause more pages to be indexed, but I don't see that as a bad thing. Showing the post separately will not trigger a duplicate content penalty. Consider this: "a" is a subset of "abcdefg", yet you would never say that "a" is a duplicate of "abcdefg", it would be "abcdefe" that would trigger a dupe content filter. It is the same with a thread and single posts—one post on a page is not a duplicate of 20 posts of the thread on a page. Even twitter shows single statuses on their own page.

 

[Chromaniac]

Showing the post separately will not trigger a duplicate content penalty.

i am not sure about this part. most seo tools aimed at blogs are designed to prevent indexing of pages and even categories in some cases because they show duplicate content in the end.

of course, google might give popular blogging platforms the benefit of doubt wrt to same post appearing on multiple sections.

but i am not sure if it is a confirmed fact

even vbseo people recommend disabling posts appearing on their individual pages and have a setting that disables that functionality...

 

[Kier]

Showing the post separately will not trigger a duplicate content penalty.

I'm not concerned with duplicate content penalties, I'm more interested in 'click quota', or the amount of links a search engine will follow on a single visit. It stands to reason that search engines will spend a limited amount of time spidering, and so it's important to make sure that the links you present to them are all going to contain good quality content that has not been seen before.

By linking to /posts/1234, the search engine has no way of knowing that it's linking back to the same page, and you waste the spider's time, thereby decreasing the speed at which your site will be fully indexed.

 

[Mike]

Actually, I see it as a human usability thing as well. The thread link gives more context to a human about the content they're going to see (the thread it's in and the page).

 

[Chromaniac]

mike's post is the perfect reason why i am looking for this. title tags usually provide even (!) more context compared to a plain URI. sorry for being offtopic here.

 

[Dean]

User experience is everything, to us at least. And we exist because of external links to our content on other similar sites, not seo/google.

This will require much testing.

 

[Mike]

mike's post is the perfect reason why i am looking for this. title tags usually provide even (!) more context compared to a plain URI. sorry for being offtopic here.

The links are not only going to be used within the confines of a XenForo install though. Sending links about in IM would be the obvious case.

 

[Chromaniac]

true. with twitter planning to use t.co with long term plans to have all third party apps display part of the original URL (it is already implemented on their own site though it does not always work) instead of the shortened link (bit.ly etc.) i guess it makes sense.

 

[Enigma]

It goes to t2 provided you setup a redirect when you do the merge (it's an option when doing it). Otherwise, it's no different from deleting the thread. But it can't take you to the post - well, it may, but it depends on the circumstances. The server doesn't get the stuff after the #.

I don't know if it would be desirable to add some Javascript to thread pages to catch invalid threads/title.123#post456 links and redirect them to the correct page. It would be possible to read the # fragment and if that post is not visible on the page, do a redirect. Are there any possible ways that could be abused?

 

[TimWF]

I don't know if it would be desirable to add some Javascript to thread pages to catch invalid threads/title.123#post456 links and redirect them to the correct page. It would be possible to read the # fragment and if that post is not visible on the page, do a redirect. Are there any possible ways that could be abused?

Something along these lines would be great. I love a nice looking link for sure, but it is bad if it doesn't work.

One other situation that should be considered related to this is the option in the administration to change the number of messages per page under "Options" > "Threads, Discussions...". If an established forum with many posts and people deep linking into threads to particular posts were to change that one option (defaulted to 20) to say 40 as an example, it would result in any previously built link to a post after the 20th post forum wide being broken. Clearly that isn't something that is going to happen a lot, but it isn't a mistake that would be hard to make if you don't know the implications it has.