Location Manager

What do you mean?

If I’m setting it to “default” GD permalinks I can click as often as I can on the place in a listing, but the detailed page is not opening.

If I switch to “Full location” I can open the place detail page, BUT now one “/” is missing in the link behind the “/place” so I’m getting an error.

Also the plugin is not respecting the location home URL and always try to send me to a location oriented page instead of “/”. I have no location switcher on and it looks like that the URL generation tries to do something of a preselected location.

Plugin has been tested for over 5 weeks, few bugs are to be expected.

I was just wondering as all people starting to test the LMv2 are running in the same problems directly after installing the plugin.

Same issue here: GeoDirectory permalink error the following rule appears twice: ^places/([^/]*)/? Try making the GeoDirectory permalinks more unique.

Fresh install with Core Version 2.0.0.18 and and LM Version 2.0.0.2-beta.

Issue occurs as soon as I activate the LM plugin.

I did have custom permalinks, but I reverted back to the default once. Did not fix the issue.

looking forward to the update.

For the “^places/([^/]*)/?” permalinks issue, this is because the default permalinks is matching the country one:
/places/united-states/
/places/eiffel-tower/

It does not know if it should be looking for a place or a country, i have been testing with lots of different combinations of permalinks but rarely the default place ones. All you have to do to get around this to test is to change the place permalinks to not be standard.

In the long run there are 3 ways we can solve this:
1. Not allow just the place names if you also want to use the country slugs.
2. Add an extra prefix to place location urls like:
from: /places/united-states/
to: /places/location/united-states/
(maybe only when this permalink type is setup)
3. We could add a filter to run some queries before the main query to tell it what type to run. (this is my least favorite option, though it would allow both to be used it is the least efficient way to do things)

Feedback welcome.

Thanks,

Stiofan

Hi Stiofan

I would prefer a solution that is best for SEO / google.
Most important for SEO in a directory are the category and location pages (and the combination of them). I don’t know if solution 1. or 2. is better for that. (don’t like 3.)

Can you tell me what permalink structure is best for SEO?

I prefer default like this: http://xyz.com/places/sample-place/
with these settings:
– Enable default country (yes)
– Hide country part of url for LISTING, CPT and LOCATION pages (Yes)

Thanks, Marc

What does in the long run here means?

I need two options at two different sites:
1) Default: /[CPT-slug]/[place-name/slug]
2) Full location: /[CPT-slug]/[country slug]/[region slug]/[city slug]/[place slug]
I’m not using neighbourhoods.

In case of SEO I see an advantage with solution one because if readability of the urls at the SRPs.

For the test I’m getting 404 switching to “Full location”:
1) Go to places
2) Go to any detailed place page
3) Click on Places again
–> 404 with a wrong created link

Dirk

Thanks Paolo for you input!
Marc

Rankings are all about content, backlinks and now dwell time is becoming more and more important.

The site structure is more about being easily crawled and indexed, but also for UX.

If hierarchy is not logical, user may get easily confused. (I have a good article to link too https://neilpatel.com/blog/site-structure-enhance-seo/)

You can have the best short URL of all, but if the content is not very good, you have few backlinks and a high bouncing rate, Google will not rank you in top positions.

While if you have long URLs, but also the best content, a lot of backlinks and users stay on your pages for longer than average, you will be ranked high.

The problem is that if you have a messy URL structure, a lot of your pages may not even get crawled, if you don’t have a sitemap.

Also please read what they recommend on that ahrefs article below the URL Lenght chapter:

Recommendation

Even though we did see a small correlation here with preference towards shorter URLs, I don’t believe this is a significant enough ranking factor.

I do recommend you to keep your URLs short, but mostly for user experience reasons and not because this will help you rank higher.

Even for UX, I think it is clearer this:

site.com/places/united-states/california/san-francisco/restaurants/gusteau/

rather than this:

site.com/places/gusteau/

On the 1st case from the URL you’ll know that we are talking about a restaurant in San Fran.

The second doesn’t tell as much.

Thanks

Currently my directory at Motorsport Prospects only uses the category and listing name (https://www.motorsportprospects.com/teams/crosslink-kiwi-motorsport/). For what I need that is fine. This was very easy to accomplish with V1. Do I have the option to do this with V2?