We use Nationbuilder for our website and discovered that when Nationbuilder encodes links (for tracking), it will break them if they contain multiple query parameters.
For instance, say we insert the following link in an email in Nationbuilder:
click me
Assuming our Nationbuilder website is hosted at www.website.org, then Nationbuilder will rewrite the link as such:
click me
When one clicks the link above, Nationbuilder processes it and records the click event in their system, but then incorrectly redirects to http://www.example.com?a=1 and discards &b=2.
Most people will immediately identify the problem -- our original url, passed as the "u" query parameter above, was not properly encoded by Nationbuilder. At the very least the ampersand before "b" should have been encoded, if not the equal signs as well, so that our entire original url would be captured in the "u" parameter. The correct link created by Nationbuilder, with the proper encoding, should have been this:
click me
Shockingly, Nationbuilder tech support and their engineers say this behavior is "working as expected". We pointed out that no one would expect a working link to become a broken link, but they refuse to treat is as a bug or at least as a design error.
Does anyone have a suggestion for how we can get around this Nationbuilder "feature" of breaking links with query parameters? We use query parameters extensively in our URLs. We were thinking of shortening every link through bit.ly so they would have no query parameters but that seems like a lot of unnecessary work.
Thanks!
Yeah, simply take your link with a parameter, and encode it, using a tool like this, http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/dencoder/ so your URLs are not broken by NB's processing.
so
example.com/page?a=1&b=2
becomes
example.com%2Fpage%3Fa%3D1%26b%3D2
If none of the provided solutions work, you could use a URL shortening service such as bit.ly, and link to those shortened URLs from your NB email blast, which will then redirect to your full URLs as provided to the shortening service.
Related
I'm not aware of link designing strategies, so I am not sure why my link gets chopped off when someone clicks on from sources like Facebook etc.
I have a 'share feature' on my platform, which lets a user create a link to their listing and share it with people.
The link I generate for the listing in my backend has parameters, which reads the listing id and the type and displays content over HTML
Here's a sample link for a listing
https://www.fayvors.com/Share.html?hash=5eccccaa-7b8d-42bd-af8c-08d50da0c867?type=lessons/
However, when I share the link on facebook and click it, the browser redirects to a link that's cut off
https://www.fayvors.com/Share.html?hash=5eccccaa-7b8d-42bd-af8c-08d50da0c867%3Ftype%3Dlessons
I'm not aware of link designing principles, so I'm a bit lost here!
Thanks!
Your URL contains “special characters” (like a second question mark inside the query string), but you neglected to apply proper URL encoding when putting this URL as a parameter value into another URL:
javascript:window.location.replace('https://www.facebook.com/sharer/sharer.php?u='+window.location)
Use encodeURIComponent on the value you are concatenating to the sharer URL here.
I've came across this page https://www.tumblr.com/examples/share/sharing-links-to-articles.html which shows a possible way to customly create a share URL for tumblr.
Simplified version of what they have:
Click to share
http://jsfiddle.net/m5ow6bhs/2/
This will take you to the log in page or straight to the share page if you're already logged in. However, if you change the http%3A%2F%2F part to a simple http:// it will now load to a "Not Found Page". http://jsfiddle.net/m5ow6bhs/3/ What the hell Tumblr?
Do you guys have any idea what's going on or what's the correct code to share something to Tumblr?
Cheers.
As with most share services, the URL should be passed as an encoded string. This supports the OPs comments about http%3A%2F%2F(encoded) and http:// (raw).
Tumblr provides variable transformations in the theme operators to handle encoding, but sadly it doesn't work with custom variables.
One quick solution is to drop the http:// part. Example: http://jsfiddle.net/L9jd8dhz/
I have discovered as of recently that the share URL needs to be updated as such:
https://www.tumblr.com/widgets/share/tool?shareSource=legacy&canonicalUrl=<-urlencode(share_url)->&posttype=link
The &posttype= seems to be a new requirement to make the share work correctly.
Trying to read in the pricing lists under pricing information tab:
urlread( ' http://www.cefconnect.com/Details/Summary.aspx?Ticker=KYE#pricing ' )
But in url '#pricing' doesn't help.
Any suggestions?
As already pointed out by Darin, it's no use adding #pricing to the URL. The web page uses client-side techniques to switch between tabs; not something that can be used by urlread.
Summary.aspx always returns all tabs together as one big page. CSS and JavaScript make it look like a collection of tabs, when opened in a web browser.
Use the developer toolbar of your web browser to inspect the web page. For example in Google Chrome, just right-click on the section you are interested in, and select 'inspect element'.
I don't know what you are going to do with the result of urlread, but you'll probably have to do some parsing to distill the information you need from the HTML clutter.
Please note Summary.aspx launches additional HTTP requests to retrieve additional data. Use the 'Network' tab of Chrome's developer toolbar to analyze that behavior. For example, the following request is made when you click 'GO' after adjusting the pricing history filter criteria.
http://www.cefconnect.com/Resources/TableData/?Type=PricingHistory&Cusip=48660P104¶m0=1M¶m1=06/06/2014
At first, this seems to complicate the whole matter, but it may actually be a great opportunity. You can call urlread with the URL above, and get some data in JSON format, which is far less cluttered than HTML. Adjust the parameters to get different data. I'm not sure what 48660P104 is; it might be an internal representation of KYE. You may want to use an initial HTTP request to Summary.aspx to retrieve that code; you'll notice the webpage is littered with URLs containing the same parameter Cusip.
The # character has a special meaning in an url. It represents the fragment identifier and the value following it is never sent to the server. Only client side javascript can access it. You will need to url encode the value if you want to send it to the server:
urlread( ' http://www.cefconnect.com/Details/Summary.aspx?Ticker=KYE%23pricing ' )
This also stands true for other special characters. You need to properly encode them.
I am currently working with a client to redevelop their website. One of the final things I need to do before launch, is to make sure that their old website's pages are correctly redirected to the new URL structure of the new website.
Unfortunately, when I check Google to see how their current site is indexed, this relatively small website appears to have over 1500 pages indexed.
When I look at the indexed links on Google, many appear to be duplicates of the same page, but because of the terrible URI structure used on the old website, Google treats them differently.
For example, the 'Map' page is indexed at least twice on Google, under the following 2 URLs:
www.website.com/frame_page-map.html?mp_session=iris7k85851j05q55piqci31u3&mp_session=iris7k85851j05q55piqci31u3?page_code=map&mp_session=iris7k85851j05q55piqci31u3&mp_session=iris7k85851j05q55piqci31u3
www.website.com/frame_page-map.html?mp_session=sel6m8j5cu8lulep4dqa32sne7&mp_session=sel6m8j5cu8lulep4dqa32sne7?page_code=map&mp_session=sel6m8j5cu8lulep4dqa32sne7&mp_session=sel6m8j5cu8lulep4dqa32sne7
Only the session name is different in the URL (and I have no idea why it is repeated four times in a single URL, either).
For reference, the replacement URL for this page is:
www.website.com/contact/map
My question is: How do I setup a redirect for these multiple records on Google? Do I simply set-up the redirect for the old URL minus all of the URI parameters (i.e. www.website.com/frame_page-map.html) or is there another better method to do this?
Thanks for any help you might be able to offer!
It depends on what your goals are. If you don't care about the querystrings then setup a 301 (permanent redirect) that points to just your root page - map.html. To prevent google from indexing querystring params as separate pages use the canonical tag and have it reference the parent. This isn't guaranteed to work, but google takes your canonical into consideration when indexing.
If you care about the querystring values then you will have to setup a redirect for each one. There is a querystring parameter that you can append to your redirects that will tell it to be ignored so you don't have to write a regex that detects it.
Hey, so this is one of those questions that seems obvious, and I'm probably going to feel stupid, but here goes:
I'm doing a CodeIgniter site with a search. Think of a Google type input, where you'd search for "white huskies." I have a search results page that takes a URI (MySite.com/dogs/white huskies), and takes the third part, and performs the search on that term. I'd like this to be done in the URI, and no by POST so my users can bookmark results.
The problem I'm having is how to get that search button directed to Mysite.com/dogs/WHATEVER IS IN THE INPUT. How do I get the what is in the input part into the anchor href? I know I could do this with javascript, but I've heard it's bad practice to force people to have javascript for things this small.
Thanks for the help!
Read: Form redirect to URL containing query term? - pure HTML or Django
(asked for Django, but answer fits here too)
You could have an intermediate POST page that collects the form inputs and concatenates them into a valid URL which you can then redirect to. I'm not sure if this is good or bad SEO practice however, but I can't see another way of doing this without some Javascript intervention.
Perhaps you could look at doing the intermediate POST page which takes the values are redirects you to /search/dog/white/huskies, but also have a Javascript equivalent that does this on the fly on the form submit and does a window.location refresh to the same /search/dog/white/huskies?
Just my 2 pennies worth ;)
It is possible to have CodeIgniter work with $_GET variables and URI segments securely.
A work around I have used in the past is to have the search term collected using POST, parse the required URL for use with URI segments and then redirect your user to this page.
$url = 'mysite.com/search/' . urlencode($_POST['query']);
redirect($url);
This shouldn't effect SEO but something like the URL of a search result is unlikely to have any effect on SEO anyway. Clean URLs are only really meant to be used for permanent content. If you're going to be displaying the search term on the page, remember to use xss_clean(), seen a few people make this fatal mistake before.