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.
Related
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.
I want to set up a login page in which from anywhere on the site I can send a user to it and it will display a custom message along with it. I could use a redirect and a msg query param but is this the best way to do it?
I'm working with node.js but I'm interested in a universal solution.
If you are going for easy, you can just have GET data in the URL. But, that doesn't look that nice, if you want a rather long message, plus, GET has size restrictions, where POST (virtually) hasn't.
For using post data you could use the solution of this: JavaScript post request like a form submit question, but that gives a rather messy source code (if you want a somewhat longer text).
You could keep them in a database, and only send the ID of the message to a PHP page, and get it from the database (that's what I would do, but that doesn't mean it's a good idea, just amateur here!)
You can use jQuery or simply plain javascript to extract your message from the url; the relevant question that listed links to detailed code: jquery get querystring from URL.
Then depending on how you want it displayed, apply the extracted string to your situation.
My question is very simple: is there any way to (programmatically, technically, or manually) make a Google +1, Facebook Like, or Twitter Tweet This button preserve its count after a change of URI?
Programmatically: Doing something with the javascript to make it show the combined counts of two URIs while posting the new action to only the latter.
Technically: Do they detect and follow a 301 redirect from the original resource? Is there any special text I can include in the HTTP header to tell them that they should move all "points" from the old URI to the new one?
Manually: Some form somewhere on their site that I can submit or someone I can email that will be able to copy our points over to the new URI?
(note that I use URI and not URL in this question on purpose. The canonical resource link is changing from something.php?id=idnumber to /mycoolproduct/)
EDIT
Bounty started, but don't answer with "it can't be done"
I believe there is only one solution that fits your request above universally. That solution would be to 301/302 the old URIs to the new URIs and then keep using the old URIs with your social buttons. All the major social buttons allow you to specify the URL for which to like/g+/tweet/etc. This would preserve your existing social share counts and all shared posts would still direct to the same page. The choice now becomes whether to 301 or 302 redirect. A 302 may help preserve current search placement and avoid loosing your ranking if its pretty good. A 301 redirect (moved permanently) will cause search engines to start indexing your new URLs and dropping the old ones. This might cause a loss in current search rankings. It appears that as of this post, nobody is honoring redirects for social votes of any kind.
So I think the the safest route is to 302 redirect and continue to use the old URIs for social votes. You will keep your equity this way, but must maintain your redirects and become even more invested in the old URI template. How are your redirects implemented? .htaccess? or in page? You will need to weigh the cost-benefits for your case.
Otherwise you should probably 301 and start using the new URIs for your social buttons. In this case you might loose your social equity, but are free to build new without fear of messing up anything. If the social equity you are replacing can be recouped in say 6 months or less I wouldn't bother with it and start fresh.
However, this brings up an interesting point. You mentioned programatically adding two counts. Well yes, you could put together some JavaScript to add a couple counts together, but I gotta ask why? Adding them together for visual display purposes will not actually help increase referral traffic or search ranking. So its just a facade that I don't think helps you. If you're just looking to fool your visitors into thinking you're popular, why not just generate an image server side that keeps counting up. (bad joke, don't do it!) Bottom line you can't actually redirect your social equity, you may be able to pretend to have moved it, but you can't actually.
Considering your original question asks about several social buttons, its important to note that even if one or two of these services started honoring redirects when applying social votes, it wouldn't relieve you from making the decisions above. You'll still need the redirects for existing backlinks, and if you are supporting multiple social buttons on your page the choice of redirect type will need to be made with all of the social buttons in mind.
I can't speak for how to do this with Twitter/G+ but for Facebook:
You can't 'move' the likes and comments between URLs, and for new content you should definitely start using the new URLs, but for your existing URLs you can still have the original like counts/comments work if you:
Continue pointing the Like button on the new URL to the old URL (i.e <fb:like url="http://oldurl"/>
Add an exception to your redirect code so that when Facebook's crawler (facebookexternalhit/1.* - currently 1.1) accesses it, the original set of open graph meta tags are displayed (this will keep the description, title, thumbnail, etc, working as before)
Other users that land on the 'old' URL will still be redirected to the content in its new location
I have a real solution to this problem it might not be the most conventional but it does work 100%. Using a simple jQuery plugin called sharrre. Keep in mind I'm not the best jQuery coder (If you see improvements please let me know!) but this works regardless.
Here is how I did it on my site:
Using the sharrre plugin you can add the current share count to any element on your page. I simply got the data for both URLs then added them together and displayed them on the like, tweet, share, etc buttons.
This example is with Twitter but I'm doing this with Facebook, Google Plus, Pinterest and Linkedin. Here is the code:
<li id="twitter" data-url="CURRENT-URL" class="twitter sharrre"></li>
<li id="twitter-old" data-url="OLD-URL" class="twitter sharrre" style="display: none;"></li>
Then I called sharrre's code:
$(function(){ sharrreItUp(); }
This is how my function looks on my .js file:
function sharrreItUp() {
$('#twitter').sharrre({
share: {
twitter: true
},
enableHover: false,
click: function(api, options){
api.simulateClick();
api.openPopup('twitter');
}
});
$('#twitter-old').sharrre({
share: {
twitter: true
}
});
setTimeout(function(){
var oldTwts = $('#twitter-old .box .count').html();
var newTwts = $('#twitter .box .count').html();
$('#twitter .box .count').html(parseInt(oldTwts) + parseInt(newTwts));
}, 2000);
}
And BAM... you have your new URL being sharrred and the old shares from different social networks get added into them.
Unfortunately, there is no solution for this. We have tried all possible solutions and you will simply lose your social equity if you do a 301 Redirect. We found it to not be worth the hassle of trying to maintain our vote counts, and have instead pointed our buttons to the homepage in the interim of moving to the new url structure.
demo: http://so.devilmaycode.it/preserve-google-1-facebook-like-and-twitter-tweet-this-button-counts-after-ur/
i don't wanna say something wrong, but i think you just need to define the URI inside each share button, so no matter from what URL the vote come from, the defined url will be used as count.
if you, instead already have two different sources and you want to join it, you should follow the iframe src and scrape the count from it; for google +1 the div id that contain the count is #aggregateCount for twitter is #count; an example could be as below:
<?php
$doc = new DOMDocument();
$doc->loadHTMLFile('iframe-url-goes-here');
$count = $doc->getElementById('aggregateCount');
echo $count->nodeValue;
?>
then, on your page after the DOM is loaded and the widget are loaded, you can append your own value.
hope this help, in anycase i prefer the first way.
Put in the head of the new page
<meta property="og:url" content="old_url_here"/>
This way Facebook attributes likes for the old page. The only downside is that this way when people share your link, the old rich snippet will be included.
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.
I want to crawl a site with Greasemonkey and wonder if there is a better way to temporarily store values than with GM_setValue.
What I want to do is crawl my contacts in a social network and extract the Twitter URLs from their profile pages.
My current plan is to open each profile in it's own tab, so that it looks more like a normal browsing person (ie css, scrits and images will be loaded by the browser). Then store the Twitter URL with GM_setValue. Once all profile pages have been crawled, create a page using the stored values.
I am not so happy with the storage option, though. Maybe there is a better way?
I have considered inserting the user profiles into the current page so that I could all process them with the same script instance, but I am not sure if XMLHttpRequest looks indistignuishable from normal user initiated requests.
I've had a similar project where I needed to get a whole lot of (invoice line data) from a website, and export it into an accounting database.
You could create a .aspx (or PHP etc) back end, which processes POST data and stores it in a database.
Any data you want from a single page can be stored in a form (hidden using style properties if you want), using field names or id's to identify the data. Then all you need to do is make the form action an .aspx page and submit the form using javascript.
(Alternatively you could add a submit button to the page, allowing you to check the form values before submitting to the database).
I think you should first ask yourself why you want to use Greasemonkey for your particular problem. Greasemonkey was developed as a way to modify one's browsing experience -- not as a web spider. While you might be able to get Greasemonkey to do this using GM_setValue, I think you will find your solution to be kludgy and hard to develop. That, and it will require many manual steps (like opening all of those tabs, clearing the Greasemonkey variables between runs of your script, etc).
Does anything you are doing require the JavaScript on the page to be executed? If so, you may want to consider using Perl and WWW::Mechanize::Plugin::JavaScript. Otherwise, I would recommend that you do all of this in a simple Python script. You will want to take a look at the urllib2 module. For example, take a look at the following code (note that it uses cookielib to support cookies, which you will most likely need if your script requires you to be logged into a site):
import urllib2
import cookielib
opener = urllib2.build_opener(urllib2.HTTPCookieProcessor(cookielib.CookieJar()))
response = opener.open("http://twitter.com/someguy")
responseText = response.read()
Then you can do all of the processing you want using regular expressions.
Have you considered Google Gears? That would give you access to a local SQLite database which you can store large amounts of information in.
The reason for wanting Greasemonkey
is that the page to be crawled does
not really approve of robots.
Greasemonkey seemed like the easiest
way to make the crawler look
legitimate.
Actually tainting your crawler through the browser does not make it that more legitimate. You are still breaking the terms of use of the site! WWW::Mechanize for example is equally well suited to 'spoof' your User Agent String, but that and crawling is, if the site does not allow spiders/crawlers, illegal!
The reason for wanting Greasemonkey is that the page to be crawled does not really approve of robots. Greasemonkey seemed like the easiest way to make the crawler look legitimate.
I think this is the the hardest way imaginable to make a crawler look legitimate. Spoofing a web browser is trivially easy with some basic understanding of HTTP headers.
Also, some sites have heuristics that look for clients that behave like spiders, so simply making requests look like browser doesn't mean the won't know what you are doing.