Right now, when I setup a “Neighborhood” in the plugin, it shows the following URL:
/country/state/city/?neighbourhood=neighborhoodname

How can I set it up so that the neighborhood map has its own proper URL like:

/country/state/city/neighborhoodname

We need easy URLs for users to see/understand and the long stuff with a question mark is not really useful – especially because these neighborhood maps will be the most popular maps on our site.

Thanks.

We are only able to show Neighbourhood names like that in URL.

Just FYI, other wesbite like tripadvisor don’t even add the neighbourhood name in the URL. Thye filter it using a sesssion only, while yelp uses URL like that for neighbourhoods: http://www.yelp.com/search?cflt=restaurants&find_loc=Upper+East+Side%2C+Manhattan%2C+NY

If they were so successful with such hugly permalinks I don’t see why you shouldn’t… 🙂

Thx

I understand that you have to prioritize improvements to the plugin, especially at this early stage.

However, I still think that adding proper neighborhood maps (rather than filters) makes sense in the long run.

As far as the other sites that you mention, both of them have proper URL neighborhood maps for Brooklyn (just as one example):
http://www.tripadvisor.com/Tourism-g60827-Brooklyn_New_York-Vacations.html
http://www.yelp.com/brooklyn

In many cases, the neighborhood maps will be more popular than the larger city maps, and I believe that they deserve a proper URL.

I guess in the meantime I will try to see if our developer can find a way to rewrite the neighborhood URL using htaccesss or some other method.

Thank you again for taking the time to at least consider the idea.

just for precision.

If you look closely, major city areas, in both sites are not treated as neighbourhoods, but as an indipendent main locations.

State NEW YORK: http://www.tripadvisor.com/Tourism-g28953-New_York-Vacations.html

Locations: New York City, Brooklin, Bronx etc.

New York City Neighbourhoods on tripadvisor (No Brooklyn in there):

Manhattan
Midtown
Murray Hill
Upper West Side
Theater District – Times Square
Financial District
Hell’s Kitchen
Upper East Side
Chelsea
SoHo
Garment District
Gramercy Park
Lower East Side
East Village
Chinatown
Harlem
West Village
etc…

On Yelp, Brooklyn is as well a main location and has it’s own neighbourhoods:

http://www.yelp.com/c/brooklyn/restaurants

Bath Beach
Bay Ridge
Bedford Stuyvesant
Bensonhurst
Bergen Beach
Boerum Hill
Borough Park
etc…

Brooklyn can be set as a main location on GD too.

Thx

I this that these examples could show that having a neighborhood URL is preferable for good SEO ranking. I just tried to do a bunch of searches for neighborhood/category matches on Google and what I found is that Trip Advisor does not rank well for neighborhood data. The places in a neighborhood might rank well, but not a full listing for those neighborhoods.

If I search “Upper West Side restaurants” or “Manhattan restaurants”, Trip Advisor is down the list – with several sites that have proper /neighborhood/ URLs listing above them.

Yelp seems to do better with getting their search query pages indexed, but Yelp also has millions of dollars to spend on SEO and advertising, and most of the people using this plugin will not have that luxury.

I have one more question about neighborhoods. In the previous script we were using, neighborhoods are treated as normal maps, so everything that works with a main map will also work with a neighborhood.

With the new plugin, is it possible to have a “Neighborhood Category Map”?

In the past, we would have this:
/city/category-name
/city/neighborhood/category-name

I can see Yelp uses this:
http://www.yelp.com/search?cflt=restaurants&find_loc=Bedford+Stuyvesant,+Brooklyn,+NY

What is the proper URL for a “Neighborhood + Category” map that might be indexed by Google with this plugin?

For example, “Williamsburg Cafes” or “Manhattan Hotels”.

I can see this:
/country/state/city/?neighbourhood=neighborhoodname
But can you do something like:
/country/state/city/?neighbourhood=neighborhoodname&category=categoryname
Does that work? Or is there some other way to generate a map showing a neighborhood and category?

Thank you again for taking the time to reply and help.

there is a way that os identical to all location.

http://wpgeo.directory/hotels/united-states/new-york/new-york/?gd_neighbourhood=midtown

Which is working, however there seems to be a session problem, because the neighbourhood variable is not attached to the category links when visiting this page:

http://wpgeo.directory/location/united-states/new-york/new-york/?gd_neighbourhood=midtown

and it should…

It’s a bug and I need to report it to the developers to fix it.

Thanks for helping finding it.