Thread

Hello,

I am trying to build a site with a sort of hierarchy where I use switchee to check for deep urls in a single template. I have it all working, I progressively get deeper into my url structure based on the content at the prior url and link content with relations. However I do not think there is a way to have my search urls properly filled in. Any one have any experience doing anything similar or should I just use pages?

Thanks,
Cory

Sorry, I’m not following.  What do you mean by “search urls properly filled in”?  Do you intend to use the EE search engine?

Yes, I am using the ee search engine. I have some content that is deeply related. The logical architecture would be /template/category/family/product.

This is a bike website so the products are lined up as
it is a bike -> Of the mountain bike variety -> the product family is this -> the exact product.

So at each step we are raising the users awareness and helping them find the proper product. I have built out a structure using a bike channel and a bike family channel where the family is categorized as mountain bike then the product is related to a family with playa field and also categorized as a mountain bike.

I am now thinking I maybe should have used some implementation of pages for this, but the content is very deeply related so I am not sure the best way to proceed. Part of me is thinking about structure, but structure kind of frightens me since I am also using Transcribe, multilingual site, and I want to do other things to ease some workflow concerns for social media.

Were it me I wouldn’t let the EE search engine drive the implementation approach for the site.  It’s a limited engine, useful on simple sites only. 

I think you’re already past being able to use it effectively.

I was trying to make logical urls and trying to help with seo by adding keywords to the urls. Is it pretty standard for ee developers to consider url’s to be less important?

Do you have any suggestions for search if I go the route I am headed?

I can’t speak for all developers..😉

For me there are projects where SEO (and especially URLs as it relates to SEO) is more important than others. I might choose a different implementation approach if that’s the case. 

The challenge is that EE is pretty URL driven, so if you want URLs that aren’t structured how EE inherently works it takes more effort, conditionals, and add-ons - so those URLs come at a cost of development time, maintenance time and possible upgrade issues down the road. You also have to be careful & ensure that page load times aren’t affected.

For search, I’m working a Google Custom Site Search into a client site now and it’s pretty straightforward using Low’s addon to bridge the Google to EE gap.  I’ve heard good things about his Search, and there is also Solspace Search, but I’ve not used either of them.

For me there are projects where SEO (and especially URLs as it relates to SEO) is more important than others. I might choose a different implementation approach if that’s the case.

Can you enlighten me on what you mean by this.

It is probably less about the client and a bit more about my crazy perfectionism 😊

Oh and I am using ce-cache to cache the heck out of everything and maybe even shoving everything to flat files and serving straight off of cloudfront if I can figure that out. So that should keep server constraints to a min.

For me there are projects where SEO (and especially URLs as it relates to SEO) is more important than others. I might choose a different implementation approach if that’s the case.

Can you enlighten me on what you mean by this.

In 10 years of business I’ve never once gotten a client simply by having a good website that someone found via a search. My business is built on referrals and personal presence in an industry.

Many of my projects have been sites for companies that - in similar ways - weren’t direct income-generators for the business, but rather a resource that supported other sales activities the company was doing.  I’ve worked for companies that pretty much knew if someone came in via a search it was too late in the sales cycle, the company should have already been aware of and in contact with that potential lead.

On projects like these if getting a different URL required add-ons, more intensive coding practices, and led to a more complex and harder to manage site in the future I’d say it wasn’t worth it (not that we’d totally bail on SEO, but just this aspect).

On the other hand I’ve worked on sites where the sole purpose for the site is to get search traffic because it was the source of income for the business. Different story there, and we’d make every effort to get the most ideal URLs along with the related (and probably more important SEO work).

Yes, this is highly philosophical. I have not been in the ee universe for a long time so I am needing to adjust my thinking some. Somethings are better here then the cms I had been working in some are not. Just need to figure out where I stand on things. Thank you for your time and sage wisdom 😊