We are currently in the process of upgrading a client site from and XSLT based Umbraco 6 site to a Razor based Umbraco 7 site. They are a tour operator and so they have a number of pages used to categorise their tours. On their old site, a tour could only have one category so they would end up with a URL and back-office tree structure like this:
www.example.com/category/tour1
Homepage
Category
Tour 1
Tour 2
Category
Tour 3
Tour 4
In their new site, tours are required to have multiple categories meaning we cannot use the tree structure of Umbraco that is so vital to its operation. We have managed to achieve this multi-category approach on other sites using the following structure:
Homepage
Category
Category
Tours
Tour 1
Tour 2
Tour 3
Tour 4
In these implementations a user would click on a category page and we would run a search on a property of each tour page to see if it contained a category ID that matched the current page they are on. The problem with this method is that when a user then clicks to view a tour, the URL is as follows:
www.example.com/tours/tour1
Ideally they would like to try and maintain the original structure of their site whilst also allowing for multiple categories so that their URLS follow this pattern:
The only way I can see this being achieved is by creating multiple pages for the same tour and nesting them beneath each category that they below to e.g:
Homepage
Category
Tour 1
Tour 2
Category
Tour 1
Tour 3
Tour 4
However, this is both bad in SEO terms as it results in duplicate content and also creates a number of issues on our end as the pages and categories are created automatically using a third party web service and the Umbraco content service meaning each tour really can only have one page as it needs to have a unique id by which it can be referenced. In the example above, both Tour1 pages would have the same unique ID meaning the update process we have would fail because there would no longer be a 1:1 relationship.
Does anyone know whether there is a method by which I can still have the tour URLs appearing as below without creating duplicate tour pages and whilst still storing the tours under the tours page in Umbraco.
Avoiding page duplication on categorised websites
Hi all,
We are currently in the process of upgrading a client site from and XSLT based Umbraco 6 site to a Razor based Umbraco 7 site. They are a tour operator and so they have a number of pages used to categorise their tours. On their old site, a tour could only have one category so they would end up with a URL and back-office tree structure like this:
In their new site, tours are required to have multiple categories meaning we cannot use the tree structure of Umbraco that is so vital to its operation. We have managed to achieve this multi-category approach on other sites using the following structure:
In these implementations a user would click on a category page and we would run a search on a property of each tour page to see if it contained a category ID that matched the current page they are on. The problem with this method is that when a user then clicks to view a tour, the URL is as follows:
Ideally they would like to try and maintain the original structure of their site whilst also allowing for multiple categories so that their URLS follow this pattern:
The only way I can see this being achieved is by creating multiple pages for the same tour and nesting them beneath each category that they below to e.g:
However, this is both bad in SEO terms as it results in duplicate content and also creates a number of issues on our end as the pages and categories are created automatically using a third party web service and the Umbraco content service meaning each tour really can only have one page as it needs to have a unique id by which it can be referenced. In the example above, both Tour1 pages would have the same unique ID meaning the update process we have would fail because there would no longer be a 1:1 relationship.
Does anyone know whether there is a method by which I can still have the tour URLs appearing as below without creating duplicate tour pages and whilst still storing the tours under the tours page in Umbraco.
Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated.
Cheers,
Jason
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