eZ Publish Search Engine Optimization

URL addresses are one of the main ranking factors during search engine indexing. Search engine robots analyze links because they generally:

• consist of one or a few words
• are related to the most important information
• direct users to pages that are extensions or are at least related to the current content

The eZ Online Editor provides an interface for adding keywords within anchor (<a>) tags.

Adding a link in eZ Online Editor.

Internal links

Links to pages on an eZ Publish site are long and complex, consisting of resource and session information. For example:

http://www.example.com/index.php?id_kat=123&id_art=234234&sess_id=a87df87g8sdfgs7d

eZ Publish has a tool called "friendly URL" to eliminate the problem of complex addresses. Friendly URLs remove special signs that search engines cannot parse, like: '?', '&', '+', '&xx', etc. Instead of "dirty" URLs, eZ Publish generates URLs containing a path to the resource. For example:

http://www.example.com/folder_name/article_title

But what happens when an editor changes the title of the article to "Updated Article Title"? eZ Publish changes the friendly URL:

http://www.example.com/folder_name/updated_article_title

If someone requests the original URL, eZ Publish automatically redirects the request to the page with the new name, thus preventing HTTP 404 Not Found errors.

URL translation

In addition to friendly URLs, eZ Publish provides the ability to create especially short and memorable URLs. This address translation can be used to provide quick and intuitive addresses for important resources. As an example, the page located at the URL:

http://ez.no/product/ez_publish/info/ez_publish_camp_2005

...can also be accessed via this URL:

http://ez.no/camp2005

Outgoing links

Linking to other well-ranked sites can have a positive effect on the rank of the page containing the link. Search engines trust big well-known information portals, especially if they are related to the topic of the page where the link originates. Links to other sites are easy to create (especially with the Online Editor ) and are easily managed via the eZ Publish URL tool.

URL verification

Valid links are critical to search engine optimization. The eZ Publish URL verification tool makes it easy to check all the links within a site and to generate statistics regarding valid and invalid URLs.

Managing URLs in the administration panel.

One of the system maintenance tasks contained in the runcronjobs.php script (installed by default in the root folder of the eZ Publish installation) checks link validity and reports broken links as "Invalid". Administrators can use this information to edit and correct URLs.

Site relocation

If you have to change the location of your site, eZ Publish can be configured to use the HTTP 301 error code response ("moved permanently"). This tells search engines about the new location of the site and ensures you keep your position in the search engine ranks.

Problems with dynamic navigation

When a website's navigation is built dynamically or via mechanisms other than standard links (for example, via JavaScript, Flash objects, frames, special characters or image maps), search engines cannot parse the links, because they can only read the HTML source code. Therefore, non-standard site navigation methods will reduce a site's link ranking because the search engine cannot identify the links.