suggestion for alternative to friendly urls

I suggest this because I’ve seen this technique used with other CMS systems and it seems to achieve some of the benefits of friendly URL’s without having to actually configure friendly urls.

The benefit I’m mostly referring to is SEO, due to the fact that the URL contains descriptive text about the page in question.

For example
site.com/index.php?id=45
is not as good as activating Friendly URLs, which would give you:
site.com/aboutus.html

My alternative, is to use the page title, or the alias (if set) to generate the url, as such:
site.com/index.php?id=45&page=aboutus

The page parameter would be completely ignored by MODx, but the simple fact that the generated links contain the text: page=aboutus helps SEO.

So, it’s not as "nice" as getting friendly URLS properly set up, as you still have &’s and =’s in the url, but the SEO still comes into play.

This would not be a replacement for friendly URLS, just an alternative, for people unable or unwilling to set it up properly.

Could this be considered as an enhancement to MODX?

Good idea actually.

Is there anything I should do to make this an official feature request?

To get this to work with your wayfinder menus you could edit the tpl chunks and change where you have href="[+wf.link+]" change to href="[+wf.link+]&page=[+alias+]". The same with any other snippets that use tpl chunks like Ditto.

You could also do that with any link int he content like this... <a href="[~[*id*]~]&page=[*alias*]">

Preliminary tests dont’ seem to cause any conflicts with other functions.

I guess that would be workable... I’d say that it’s more bother than it’s worth to do it manually when creating links within a content page, but most of the links that a web crawler would see would be coming from the wayfinder menu, which could be generated automatically. I was hoping this could be put in as an actual change to the core code, so that without modifying the wayfinder menu generation, and without creating special links within content, it would just happen based on the page alias (and if that’s not set, then it would use the page title or something appropriate) Thanks!

I think this could be made into a plug-in somehow, but don’t know how

Is there documentation on the SEO benefits of keywords in URLs? I am not an expert by any stretch of the imagination but I am curious about this becuase I have read a number of people who have extolled the virtues of readable URLs as having SEO advantage and SE people suggest otherwise?

That being said, I certainly see that this could be made into a plugin of somesort.

Another worthy alternative used by many apps is using path info... DotClear or EE do this, which do not require rewriting and yet is more friendly than query strings...