Geeklog Forums

I would really like to see a permalink function in geeklog so that people and search engines can link to stories easily. At the moment search engines mainly link to pages but as you know a page does not always hold the same story - as time goes on they get pushed to the next page

Someone write a hack - please.

ultramonkey

Not sure what it is you're looking for ... The link to this story is http://www.geeklog.net/article.php?story=2003011009254921 - anything wrong with that? Or you could add this to the storytext.thtml of your theme to make a "link to this story" link: <a href="{site_url}/article.php?story={story_id}">Link to this story</a> bye, Dirk

Wouldn't that make a good addition to the default Story Options block?

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L. Whitworth
www.finiserv.com

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L. Whitworth

Thanks Dirk - I knew you would be able to help. The thing is on my site I rarely have a "read more" link, the whole story is in the intro text. It is fairly hard to get the story URL if you cannot click the "read more" link. Anyway, I will give this a go. Cheers

I was thinking about this earlier in the week and created a page just for search engines that gives a link to all the stories. I did this because I noticed that in google there was just the problem you mentioned. You can find the page at the Gplugs site listed as the 'site index'. I just put it up there two days ago and have been waiting to see what google does when it finds it. It is not really intended for human use, and could be simplified much more because of this, and as such you could place the link to it in the footer of your site. It remains to be seen what Google will do with it. If Google picks it up and indexes all the stories -- then great it did what I intended. I will report back after Google finds it. TomW

What you have created is a "site map" and it's an excellent addition. Where can I get the code? One problem (and this applies to the search function in Geeklog) is that this needs a limit on how many stories are displayed per page. The site list on glplugs works because the site is still young. Run that same code here at Geeklog.net and I suspect there would be timeout problems. (Try using search to display all of the stories and comments posted by dirk to see an example of the potential problems.)

I will agree, it was just something I threw together and was going to refine as I played with it. I was waiting for google to search it before I did anything more. You will notice that I made it so that you can sort it different ways. One of the things I was going to play with was changing the default search from time to time. I have noticed that Google searches more often on sites that change more. I was thinking about automating the sort to force the change say everyweek? But I do not know if this would help or hurt, that is why I was going to experiment a bit. TomW

Oh yeah I have not added static pages or anything other than stories to the page. That is something that I will need to add before it is finished. TomW

Very cool idea, I look forward to seeing what you come up with. I am heading to the site now

My little experiment with a site index worked. Google found it and has begun including links direct to the stories. Check out this article on Gplugs if you are interested. Vinny also has a related experiment going on you can read about.

TomW

Do we know what the mechanism is here that causes Google to skip the link when it's on a GL page, but not skip the exact same link when it's on the siteindex page? I'm wondering if it has to do, not with the link (since that's the same) but with the text portion of the link. On the geeklog page, it is always "Read More". Besides being completely non-descriptive (and search engines can use the text that links to a page to rank the page), pages with this text almost always have it multiple times. This may also be tricking the search engine into ignoring those links. It might be an interesting experiment to link the title bar (which has the article's title in it) to the article as well, so that more descriptive links are available. Still, having a sitemap is a good idea for humans, too. Jerry---"Give a man a fish, and you've fed him for a day. Teach him to fish, and you've depleted the lake."--It Isn't Murder If They're Yankees

One of the problems is for stories which have no readmore link, because all the content is in the intro portion. And you might be right that the readmore link, being the same is ignored by google. I will watch that. Tom

Tom, You having any joy with this? I have a couple of Geek sites which Google refuses to index properly. I think that this will become a major issue in the development of Geeklog for the future. Let us know if you're having any success.

Google has been picking up the index entries and occasionally the permalinks. Doing searches on google sometimes picks up the index entries and sometimes the permalinks, but mostly just the index.php links. The purpose of the site index and the permalink was to improve search results. It seems the index.php links are given preference, but this makes sense. The site index and permalinks are only partial successes. I still do not have problems having google spidering my sites. I put up a new site last week and it was spidered and google returned results on it within 3 days. Since then two more search spiders have been there. The key once again is having a link to your site from a popular site, preferably on the front page. TomW

Hello i dont see were i can download you site map. could you be so kind and send me a link

thanks
mike

It's been a while since someone posted here, but has any progress been made on the topic of have Geeklog permalinks use text from the subject of a posting instead of a cryptic numbering system?

Google and other search engines lend some weight to keywords which appear in the URL of a page, and this is a pretty nice thing to have.

I'd love to deploy Geeklog, but this is a hold up for me.

Jake

You can change the name of the article. It doesn't have to be 200707151212123452. Just edit the story and give it a real name.

Also, you can click the title of the story to go to the story. So most browsers will let you right click the story title and copy the link to the clipboard.

And there is one more explanation on that plus a feature request
http://www.geeklog.net/forum/viewtopic.php?forum=6&amp;showtopic=65389

For the sake of completeness:
:rtfm: Geeklog and search engines

bye, Dirk