We are about to develop a new site for a tour operator who currently uses Umbraco 6 and sells different types of tours. On their existing site, tours are categorized by the type of tour:
Eg.
Day Tours
Day Tour 1
Day Tour 2
Adventure Tours
Adventure tour 1
Adventure tour 2
These give nice clear urls as follows:
www.example.com/day-tours/day-tour-1
However, as part of the new Umbraco 7 site we aim to deliver for them, they have expressed that they wish for tours to be multi-category tours in a sense that they can appear under both day tours and adventure tours.
This is all well and good and is easily acheivable by having a page dedicated to each category and all of the tours stored under one tours page. Then, when a user accesses the category page we simple run a check on all of the packages to see whether they are associated with that category.
However, our client has expressed that where possible they would like to try and obtain the url structure I have listed above whereas our suggestion would deliver the following implementation:
Eg.
Tours
Day Tour 1
Day Tour 2
Adventure tour 1
Adventure tour 2
Day Tours
Adventure Tours
Giving the urls:
www.example.com/tours/day-tour-1
www.example.com/tours/day-tour-2
To me, this is better in general for SEO as you have a clearly defined URL where you can go to to view the content and these are the URLs the links within the category page would direct to when clicked by a user however, I was wondering with this setup in mind whether it is still possible to have the tours listed under each of the categories when it comes to the URL:
e.g.
www.example.com/day-tours/day-tour-1
www.example.com/adventure-tours/day-tour-1
To me this would be worse in SEO terms as you are unnecessarily repeating the content across more than one URL and also the only way I can see of obtaining this structure is by creating multiple versions of the tours under each category.
Is this correct or am I missing a feature of Umbraco that would allow the pages to still be displayed in this way? Also, I am correct with regards to the SEO comments I mention above as this is one of the main points I have stressed to our client in opposition to finding a workaround to have the URLs appear like the used to in the old site.
could you use category tagging to actual build the url? so tours woudl be tagged... based on tag, build the url as an alias? Totally spitballing here, but i think this is a very interesting and quite common issue site builders would have. Very interseted to see how it sorts out.
The problem in this situation is that the tours can change category so one month a tour could be a day tour and a glacier tour but the user could change it the next so that it is a trekking tour and a day tour. This of course would result in a 404 for the now redundant URL. The problem with Umbraco is the tree structure system is brilliant if can fit want you want to do into it but for anything else like this, you're going to have a bit of a nightmare getting it to work.
Umbraco URL structure
Hi all,
We are about to develop a new site for a tour operator who currently uses Umbraco 6 and sells different types of tours. On their existing site, tours are categorized by the type of tour:
Eg.
These give nice clear urls as follows:
www.example.com/day-tours/day-tour-1
However, as part of the new Umbraco 7 site we aim to deliver for them, they have expressed that they wish for tours to be multi-category tours in a sense that they can appear under both day tours and adventure tours.
This is all well and good and is easily acheivable by having a page dedicated to each category and all of the tours stored under one tours page. Then, when a user accesses the category page we simple run a check on all of the packages to see whether they are associated with that category.
However, our client has expressed that where possible they would like to try and obtain the url structure I have listed above whereas our suggestion would deliver the following implementation:
Eg.
Tours
Day Tours
Giving the urls:
www.example.com/tours/day-tour-1
www.example.com/tours/day-tour-2
To me, this is better in general for SEO as you have a clearly defined URL where you can go to to view the content and these are the URLs the links within the category page would direct to when clicked by a user however, I was wondering with this setup in mind whether it is still possible to have the tours listed under each of the categories when it comes to the URL:
e.g.
www.example.com/day-tours/day-tour-1
www.example.com/adventure-tours/day-tour-1
To me this would be worse in SEO terms as you are unnecessarily repeating the content across more than one URL and also the only way I can see of obtaining this structure is by creating multiple versions of the tours under each category.
Is this correct or am I missing a feature of Umbraco that would allow the pages to still be displayed in this way? Also, I am correct with regards to the SEO comments I mention above as this is one of the main points I have stressed to our client in opposition to finding a workaround to have the URLs appear like the used to in the old site.
Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated.
/ Jason
could you use category tagging to actual build the url? so tours woudl be tagged... based on tag, build the url as an alias? Totally spitballing here, but i think this is a very interesting and quite common issue site builders would have. Very interseted to see how it sorts out.
The problem in this situation is that the tours can change category so one month a tour could be a day tour and a glacier tour but the user could change it the next so that it is a trekking tour and a day tour. This of course would result in a 404 for the now redundant URL. The problem with Umbraco is the tree structure system is brilliant if can fit want you want to do into it but for anything else like this, you're going to have a bit of a nightmare getting it to work.
if you have the Umbraco URL alis, you could capture it that way.
but I think you would do it in the URl rewrite to intercept the request and point your page down the correct path
is working on a reply...