Short links display 2 differenet links ?

Newbie Joined: Mar 08, 2007 Posts: 3

I got it working nice but then i discovered that the url on site for example :

http://mydomain.com/article-78--0-0.html

is in the search engines http://mydomain.com/article78.html

how can this be fixed both urls work but I dont want to be penalized for duplicated content Confused

Newbie Joined: Sep 12, 2008 Posts: 5

You can thank nuke for that one - ShortLinks is actually working as it should.
The first link is from the article 'comments' link in the article the second one is the article proper.
The code behind the comment link takes user preferences into consideration i.e if the user wants to see comments nested or flat and that is the reason for the two '0' in the url.

The code responsible is $r_options which is in modules/News/index.php

Code:

$story_link = '<a href="modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid='.$sid.$r_options.'">';

You may have something similar in your themes theme.php file too.

I do not have time to dig out the exact code but on one of my sites I modified that to something like

Code:

if(is_user($user)) {
$story_link = '<a href="modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid='.$sid.'">'; }
else {
$story_link = '<a href="modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid='.$sid.$r_options.'">';
}

What that basically does is wrap the link in an is_user check so the comment view 'option' is only seen by a logged in user but a none logged in users/search engines will only see the aticle78.html type link.
On the downside, that isn't a perfect solution as you now have two links with different anchor text, one is 'readmore' the other 'comments'.

Newbie Joined: Mar 08, 2007 Posts: 3

This has to be fixed somehow, can we hardcode the short url ? I did this to the social bookmarks buttons, they showed the normal nuke url instead the rewritten one :

$articleurl = $nukeurl."/article$sid.html";

Newbie Joined: Mar 08, 2007 Posts: 3

Ok I found a solution this is the hard code way. Inside modules/news open index.php

find

Code:

$story_link = '<a href="modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid='.$sid.$r_options.'">';

replace with :

Code:

$story_link = '<a href="/article'.$sid.'.html">';

Demo : www.itmag.org

Site Admin/Owner Joined: Feb 12, 2005 Posts: 945

The real problem is that *nuke passes the comment threading parameters on the URL rather than as hidden form variables or stored in cookies, which ends up producing many different links to essentially the same content.

As Phantom has said, this is an unfortunate consequence of using *nuke.

BTW, it is something Guardian and I of the RavenNuke(tm) Team have been thinking about for quite some time. It is time to change this mess!

Spam Stopper - Comments Modules · Site Admin Joined: Jul 18, 2005 Posts: 307

Yes, News is definitely "lacking" when it come to consistency on how it presents links and SE relevant data.

Another thing on my gripe list; there should be no need to use any news/article related code inside of themes (though they all do) with the exception of perhaps calling a 'what should be displayed in 'home' type function - I just don't see why you have to have almost duplicated code in the theme as well as the News module (news index.php and news article.php).

Anyway, I'm rambling and this is moving off-topic Smile

BTW aaly - thanks for putting the link back Smile