Ditto pagination fails to be a SEO link

The greatest thing I found about MODx is it’s SEO friendly URL’s.

However... when using Ditto pagination, let’s say if you have document called page.html
when paginated it will look like - page.html?start=0 page.html?start=5 etc...

I’m not sure if I missed something but it seems that the pagination is having issue with this. If the ? parameter is an issue with some search engines, then if you have paginated pages like this only the first page will get crawled which is too bad.

I noticed the same issue with NewsListing even though as I understand Ditto is much better.

Is it possible to use possibly some sort of delimiter or magic string i.e. page-get5.html where "get" would be for example magic string (user defined perhaps?) and 5 would be start parameter.

Of course, if there are more parameters they could be delimited using some standard, either order or another magic word or something else.

Have I missed something like a parameter or something or is this really an issue?

I’m not sure it is the ’?’ that causes an issue. I always thought it was the ’?id=’ combination that search engines don’t like and potentially steer away from.

I maybe wrong on that but that’s always been my understanding.

I too think it is id= that they really don’t care for.

And in any case, I thought it was an indexing issue rather than crawling.

I’m not completely sure why you’d want page 2 of your Ditto results being *indexed*, surely the pages link to other documents which you do want indexing?

Therefore, I’d recommend you add a "View All" page which has just the page titles. And remember, once some news item drops to page 2, the news item page doesn’t drop out of the search engine’s index.

Take a look: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=34431&topic=8522

"However, these pages can cause problems for our crawler and may be ignored".

So it is indeed possible that they are dropped and ignored.
Actually similar claims are all over their site look: http://www.vbseo.com/f2/google-com-dynamic-vs-static-urls-2466/

The solution could be in creating a sitemap of course. or perhaps using "folders" - www.site.com/5/page.html ? where 5 is "start" parameter.

What I want to use paginating for is the "articles" pages. The articles are structured in folders, and they are named after the article category. If for example some category gets crowded with articles pagination is elegant solution for people to browse them as it also can provide summary description and listing only article names in a long list wouldn’t really look good.

As I’m developer, I can propose adding a define near the top of ditto containing something like:
$paramorder = ’start,end,whatever,somethingelse’;
then splitting that into an array

finally when page that is paginated is encountered:
page-5-3-4-1.html - where 5, 3, 4 and 1 would be start, end, whatever and somethingelse parameters. i used something like that on some other sites. There are a number of soulutions but I’m not sure how would it affect the basic MODx url rewriter... as i see:

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?q=$1 [L,QSA]

as this looks i think there would be the need for some delimiter to recognize the parameters behind for the paginator and distinguish them from page alias.

how does that look?

You’re confusing the .htaccess file with the MODx URL system. Presently, if passed page-5-3-4-1.html, MODx will look for a document with the alias "page-5-3-4-1". It doesn’t pass 5-3-4-1 to "page".

So the reason Ditto doesn’t do SEO friendly URLs for pagination is because MODx can’t currently cope with it. Composite friendly URLs is certainly something that I personally want to see addressed in a future release. But it’s not here now, and it’s not a failing of Ditto.

It’s just about possible to set up something with .htaccess and hacks to Ditto, but I don’t see it being worth the hassle.

Quote from: phazze at Sep 19, 2006, 12:30 PM

listing only article names in a long list wouldn’t really look good.

Eh? It’s intended *in addition* to the pagination, not instead. When you have 5 pages, a single list is sometimes easier to find an article in. Another page full of juicy links is good SEO and good usability.

And yes, Sitemap.