Good Skin URL's

Hi,

Could you please fix the URL's in jrMediaProLight. Such as by_albums, by_plays, etc... It is bad practice for the search engines to use underscores. The search engines want to see hyphens in their URL's, such as By-Albums, By-Plays, etc....

I was able to change some of the url's, but not the ones like shown above.


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Thank You
~Michael
Audio Engineer | Graphic and Design |

https://www.damatoproduction.com
https://www.HomeStudioMusicProduction.com
https://www.ShotsInOrder.com
https://www.playgroundz.rocks
updated by @michael-d: 06/10/14 01:46:58PM

Its not bad practice. It may have been 9 years ago in 2005 if your referring to this post:
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/dashes-vs-underscores/

but the internet has changed a lot since then. Both characters represent a space. Its not going to effect your search engine rankings.

Wikipedia uses '_'.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

If you really want to change them, find the links that have "/by_plays" in the .tpl files for your skin and change them, then update the files that they link to. eg: music_row.tpl file and look for:

I would hazard a guess that not many people are going to be searching on the keyword "Music By Plays" anyhow.
http://demo.jamroom.net/jrMediaPro/music/by_plays

Suggestion noted. Thanks.

Hi,

No im not referring to blog posts wich could be very inaccurate. I am referring to google webmaster central, webmasters tools guidlines and considerations.

Taken straight from the source.

Consider using punctuation in your URLs. The URL http://www.example.com/green-dress.html is much more useful to us than http://www.example.com/greendress.html. We recommend that you use hyphens (-) instead of underscores (_) in your URLs.

Wish these things were better implemented like better seo practices, skins, and styling, and opt ins, and landing pages, etc.....

The coding is great in jamroom, and all these little bug fixes that I've never really seem to see a problem anyway. Focus on these other areas!!! Please!!!!

Another perfecrt example would be the media pro light skin. There are about 10 different text colors going on, and most of them don't even flow with the style of the skin.

So i spend my days padding h1 tags, changing language strings, changing text colors, text link colors, text hover colors, renaming menu items, and so on and so on, for the last 8 years. Its a never ending obstacle.

Thats a huge waste of time for the end user. Our time should be spent marketing, promoting, advertising, and publishing good content.

I hope to see this some day.


--
Thank You
~Michael
Audio Engineer | Graphic and Design |

https://www.damatoproduction.com
https://www.HomeStudioMusicProduction.com
https://www.ShotsInOrder.com
https://www.playgroundz.rocks

Are you looking at a smaller picture?
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/14/05/03/007209/could-googles-test-of-hiding-complete-urls-in-chrome-become-a-standard


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¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Education, learning resources, TEL, AR/VR/MR, CC licensed content, panoramas, interactive narrative, sectional modules (like jrDocs), lunch at Uni of Bristol. Get in touch if you share my current interests or can suggest better :)

Check out how google uses underscores in their own urls:
https://www.google.com/#q=site:google.com+inurl:united_states

I couldn't find any google.com urls which use united-states (discounting urls on feedproxy.google.com of course)


--
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Education, learning resources, TEL, AR/VR/MR, CC licensed content, panoramas, interactive narrative, sectional modules (like jrDocs), lunch at Uni of Bristol. Get in touch if you share my current interests or can suggest better :)
updated by @ultrajam: 05/05/14 02:54:44AM

I hear what you're saying - but you gotta understand that the fixes may not affect you, but could potentially be affecting paying/subscribing customers.

Jamroom wasn't designed to be 100% to anyone's liking out of the box. They leave plenty of room for customization, and I feel that it's a big upgrade from what Jamroom 4 was. Not sure if you used JR during that era.

Anyways, I see where you're coming from because I have made many motions for improvements also - but at the end of the day JR support team has addressed most of my concerns by showing me ways to customize it to my needs.

If I could show you some of the hacks I did to rewrite content title URLs in the old JR4 system you would probably puke.

Everything is kosher now if you ask me!
I think if anything, JR lacks more Skin designers. That will come over time...

Good luck!
updated by @ilovehousemusic: 05/07/14 07:14:46PM

I think using dashes instead of underscores is a good idea, and one we should try to adhere to moving forward. I'll make sure this is something we check for before any new skins go out.

Thanks!


--
Brian Johnson
Founder and Lead Developer - Jamroom
https://www.jamroom.net

It's a good idea if its necessary, but surely google would start using hyphens in their own urls if it were important. Try a couple of searches using site:google.com and inurl:
Google don't seem to love hyphens much themselves. Wordpress seo "experts" do though.

On a more practical note, how should I go about checking for that in my skin? Do I just need to use hyphens everywhere, or is there something else I need to do?


--
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Education, learning resources, TEL, AR/VR/MR, CC licensed content, panoramas, interactive narrative, sectional modules (like jrDocs), lunch at Uni of Bristol. Get in touch if you share my current interests or can suggest better :)
updated by @ultrajam: 05/08/14 11:41:00AM

I agree with you - using hyphens versus underscores is probably way, way down on the list of things that might play a tiny role in your SERP rankings. However it's really not a big deal to use hyphens versus underscores, so if it makes users happier then why not.

For the most part, all that needs to be done is to find template names that have underscores in them and just change them to hyphens, then update any URLs that have that template in it to be the new name.


--
Brian Johnson
Founder and Lead Developer - Jamroom
https://www.jamroom.net

here's one reason not to:
* it makes functions look ugly.

If i use the url:
site.com/(some profile)/(my module)/latest-releases

and want to make a custom profile view for that the function name becomes:

yuck. So its a "Nice for programmers to look at VS something that may or may not effect SEO" debate.

You wouldn't do it that way Michael - you just create a "default" view in your profile.php, and then handle whatever templates come in on the URL - i.e.

site.com/(some profile)/(my module)/latest-releases

would map to:

profile_view_myModule_default()

and INSIDE that function you would just do:


(with other logic of course before that to test for existing templates, get replacement vars, etc.)

then you would just have a "latest-releases.tpl" file in your module's templates folder.


--
Brian Johnson
Founder and Lead Developer - Jamroom
https://www.jamroom.net
updated by @brian: 05/09/14 08:34:23AM