Updating page URLs and bookmarking
By Joe on Friday, January 11 2008, 15:44 - SiteMaker features - Permalink
New changes due out in Feb will make navigating around your site more intuitive and allow your customers to bookmark specific pages. For more details read on.
What are we changing?
Every page in your website e.g. yoursite.moonfruit.com, has its own URL (internet address), which is yoursite.moonfruit.com/yourpage. However when people navigate around your site the URL doesn't update. A side effect of this is that you cannot bookmark a particular page as the address bar always shows the URL that you or your customers first arrived at. Well, all that is about to change.
In February we will introduce a change that will update the URL whenever you change pages. However, it will do this without refreshing the page, so music will continue playing and there will be no interruption to content. Because every page will now update the URL in the address bar, your visitors will have a much better idea of where they are as they navigate through your site. They will also be able to bookmark a specific page in the normal way, which means having saved that page in their ‘Favorites’ they will be able to return directly to the correct point in your site. It will also mean they can email these page links to other people by cutting and pasting from the address bar.
It has only become possible to do this since we increased the minimum requirements for SiteMaker to Flash 8. This is partly why we pushed that change through a few months ago and why we are completing this work now.
So what will it look like for you?
Well, if you have a site, e.g. www.joeslondontaxis.com, and you click on the Taxi Booking page, the URL will update to:
www.joeslondontaxis.com/#/taxibooking/4521371523
which is the address of that page. If you then click on Airport Taxi Booking in the menu the URL will update to:
www.joeslondontaxis.com/#/airporttaxibooking/4521387384
which is the address of that page. Your visitors will be able to go 'forward' and 'back' in the browser history as normal (and the URL will keep correctly updating), and they will be able to bookmark those pages too.
If you're wondering why your page addresses have a number after them, this is the unique ID for that page. Because we permit you to have two different pages in your site with the same name, we append the page name with the unique ID to be sure that we serve up the right page. This is similar to the way many large sites work, e.g. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7178288.stm from the BBC.
As for the # character, well that's just the character we use to let the Flash site know which page it should be looking at, and to tell the browser not to refresh the page.
So there you have it! An exciting new change to improve the navigation and bookmarking of your site. Coming soon to a Moonfruit site near you...
Comments
Wouldn't the url changing make the pages load slower?
Hi criptor, no it won't affect the page loading. The change means the URL updates, but does not reload the page. This is why we use the syntax with the # character, which allows us to create an updated URL and page history without causing any page refreshes. I hope that makes sense, Joe
This is sick! I have been looking for this feature for a long time! I had to manually type out the Direct URL on each page if I wanted to show people how to send the link to others. It was definitely a pain for friends to send a URL to a specific page unless I told them exactly how to do it.
This will make navigation much simpler for new visitors because it will be just like every other site out there.
Thanks guys! Nice work.
Dj RyB
what about a link to send you to a specific part of that page.
I agree with criptor9, Anchor linking would be extrreeeeeemely beneficial to us.
@criptor9, Drum n Bass UK: That's something we've been talking about in the office, it's great to know you guys are interested too. Getting the URL's working properly is quite a large step technically, once we're happy everything' working smoothly we can start looking at adding the finesse.
This is brilliant! I was just about to ask for this on the WishList. FAST WORK! :-)
That's great! also agree a link to a specfic part of a page would be very usful even back to top if possible. Can anyone advise me if web streaming is possible with sitemaker.
Thanks folks...
Hi guys,
I am very happy to see that moonfruit go ahead into developing and improving the software. I am really excited by this new features especially url full adress writing.
but i am not really sure that can help us in order to improve the ranking of the website on google or yahoo. Why? Actually as i mentionned it to you during our last meeting in Paris within the gandi office in order to be more visible and make the website more attractive and improve the ranking, an url rewriting as for exemple www.exemple.com/key-word/key-word-2/key-word contrary to an adress like www.exemple.com/mypage/#/67546787 in fact google boat stop croxling and taking into account the key word into the url adress when he find and # or ? or specific symbol which we currently find in the common website today.
I hope that adresses will be close to what google and other internet company advice for improving visibility on internet.
Last but not least i wanted to say thank for the form changes. it is very usefull and easy to set up. But i hope that it would be possible in the future to be able to put more than one field per line (for instance multiple dot entries on the same horizontal line or two input lines on the same line etc...)
Have a good day and thank you for the good work you do every day for the moonfruit community
hakim
This is very good news.... and another positive seo measure.... not too mention linking and the navigation back and forth. Way to go team... keep up the fantastic work.
Jeff
Excellent! 1 day moonfruit will rule the online Site Making division if they carry on like this. If they check the forums regular and add the few bits & bobs people are asking for, you just know it will be the best website equipment available.
Brilliant - Well done to the team.
Joe - another improvement that will be much valued, I look forward to its release. One question for you though:
Will the Google Page Rank be displayed for each page in the Google Toolbar as a result of this change? IE. At present the Page Range (green bar) is displayed for the page you land on. Like the Moonfruit URL address at present, it remains the same when you navigate to other pages.
- oh and just incase you are looking for a couple of really simple SEO improvements... Can you please extend the Page Name length to accept more than 30 characters, perhaps to at least 50? Whilst you are there you might also look at extending meta tag Page Title to 75 characters from the current 50. Both of these tweaks would pull Moonfruit up a huge notch in terms of SEO.
thanks
Justin
Hi Bdesigner (and Justin - this will answer your question too),
Every page in your site has a URL which is www.yoursite.com/yourpage. This is a real URL that is indexed by search engines and contains all your page data and is used for SEO.
If we were to update the browser to this real URL on each page click, then your site would refresh on every click, which would make it slower and lose things like continuous music, etc.
Instead of refreshing the page, in this new change, we are adding a URL structure that contains enough information so that the Flash can navigate the site and maintain a history (e.g. allow 'back' to work), but is specifically ignored by the browser and search engine. We don't want them to think there are 2 URLs for the same page, so we use the # symbol which they ignore.
So to answer the questions, this change will make no difference to SEO whatsoever. The page URL that browsers see (with the # symbol) can be used to bookmark and navigate, but is not a true page (e.g. does not reload the HTML) and will be ignored by search engines. Your true pages are still of the format www.sitenamer.com/pagename and still used in the non-flash version (seen by the search engines) and the new sitemaps. So they will continue to use these addresses.
So Justin, to answer you, no the page rank in the google toolbar will not update as you navigate as the HTML page you are on is not being refreshed.
I hope that makes things a bit clearer. Thanks,
Joe
Thing is, you can give people links directly to a certain page as it is,
you just type http://bristolnightlife.com/contact...
for the contact page......just add the page name on the end of your domain.
Still good, just explaining as maybe some people dint know that!
thanks for this, and for your clear explanations of all the implications. I think overall it's an excellent compromise.
Like Justin, I also would like to see a 75-character count permissable for page titles.
I had asked for more room myself on previous seo discussions on this blog. I had suggested 60-65 I believe.... based on this article snip below...
Web Page Title Tag Limits (Maximum Lengths)
The W3C, in their page W3C - The TITLE element in HTML , states: "The title should ideally be less than 64 characters in length. That is, many applications will display document titles in window titles, menus, etc where there is only limited room." A 64 character limit is a good starting place, but oversimplifies things a bit.
Google will display up to 66 characters of a title tag, cropping to complete words. For example, the following title is exactly 68 characters, so Google leaves off the last word in the title when displaying the website in its search results:
68-Character Title Tag: Creating Title Tags for Search Engine Optimization and Web Usability
Google Display: Creating Title Tags for Search Engine Optimization and Web ...
On the other hand, if the word "and" were replaced with an ampersand, the title would be exactly 66 characters, and would be displayed in full:
66-Character Title Tag: Creating Title Tags for Search Engine Optimization & Web Usability
Google Display: Creating Title Tags for Search Engine Optimization & Web Usability
Google isn't the only thing to consider when deciding on the optimal title tag limit. Yahoo! has an absolute cutoff in presenting titles of exactly 120 characters, which is substantially longer and gives the webmaster much more room to present longer titles. If your title exceeds 120 characters, the title will simply be cropped, whether the display title ends in a complete word or not. That is quite different from Google, which ends the display title with the last complete word which ended before the 66 character limit was reached.
The best strategy for creating a long title is to make sure that the title works for both Google and Yahoo. The optimal title tag should be thought of as consisting of a primary title (for Google) and a secondary title (for Yahoo!). Your primary title length should be limited to 66 characters, including spaces and punctuation. Your secondary title can be any length up to the point where the full title reaches 120 characters in length. You can create a longer title if you wish, but be aware that anything beyond 120 characters will be cropped in the Yahoo! search results, and no one will ever see it.
Spot on Toronto.
This may not be the best place to have a lengthy exchange on this topic but the point I think we both agree on is that having a limit of 50 characters is very constraining. Just to have the ability to include even 16 more characters would mean getting a couple of extra keywords or a complete keyword phrase into this all important tag.
It always huge struggle to get what I need the Title Tag to say into the 50 characters – I use every single character up for most of my pages. It seems so simple just to increase this. (oh, and to a lesser degree don’t forget the Page Name character constraints either)
I would be intrigued to find out if in fact this is not so simple a request from Moonfruit's point of view, as I cannot understand why this has not been done otherwise – especially as Joe and his developers have been so good at listening to users and taking action of late.
Hi guys, we're looking at this now for you. Sometimes these things are more complicated than they seem due to database table constraints, but sometimes they are just because we did it that way a long time ago and didn't think about it ;-) hopefull it's one of those. I'll find out and let you know. So in an ideal world, how many characters would you want in the page title?
Joe
Thanks for looking into this Joe, I am sure it wil be much appeciated by all your customers who build with SEO in mind.
My request would be:-
Meta Tag Page Title Field : 75 characters
Actual Page Name [eg. when creating a new page] : 75 characters (would settle for 50 though)
Many thanks - Justin
Hi There,
Just recently we have noticed that the video player continues play even when visitors move to a new page. This only seems to be happening on the new site we are setting up (www.mikeypowell-campaign.org.uk), the problem does not arise on the 4WardEver Campaign site.
Don't know if other Moonfruiters have noticed this? Please advise!
Regards,
Tippa
Hi Justin, this may be more difficult for the actual page name, as this is also the name that is used in the menu, which means it would create some nasty cropping if it can't fit. The Page Title tag should not be a problem and we'll change it on the next release. Thanks,
Joe
Wow - RESULT :-)
V.happy to hear the good news about the Title Tag.
As far as the actual page name goes the 'nasty cropping' you mention happens anyway at the moment on the menu display if you have too many words in a page title, so I don't see the difference of increasing this field from 30 characters to a few more.
The reason being, as you may have worked out already, is that if you create your own menus from inserting Button Links or your own button graphics then you can label the button "ABC" and have the page name as "XYZ". This means that you can create your own menus and then have your URL containing what you want (v.valuable in SEO terms).
I won't push my luck as I am happy with the result on the Meta Name, but expanding the Page Name field would make sense if it provides more options for users and has no practical or technical drawbacks.
Thanks again
Justin
Hi Justin, yes, I thought you might say that ;-) I'll speak to the guys and see what we can do. This one may be a database issue though. Thanks, Joe
Hey guys,
This is great news! I won't say any more as it's all been said already - good on ya.
Just wanted to say that we got around this problem of visitors wanting to save the full URL or send it to someone else, by inserting the 'forward to a friend' feature on the most topical pages of our sites. Following another upgrade by MF last year, this meant that the full URL (including our own domain name) could be easily sent on to others.
What some of our regular visitors would do also, is email a page to themselves then cut and past the full URL that showed up in their mail - it is a fairly quick and efficient way for most people; however your upgrade will help visitors who are not particularly PC savvy, and who think that a cut&paste is something to do with hanging wallpaper........!! They will be happy! :-)
Lookin forward to Feb,
Tippa
Hi Justin,
I've got the answers for you, the 30 character menu name field is actually a database constraint, which means it's much more difficult for us to change. Which is not to say we won't do it, but we can't do it quickly. The page title meta tag is a quick change, so we'll increase that to 120 characters on the next release. Thanks,
Joe
thanks for the update joe... that is very good news and a quick turnaround... when is next release approx. ?
Jeff
Why moonfruit does not work now? I can't edit my website...
I see this as a really valuable function.
Often I link to pages on my site from my blogs and social networking profiles ... being able to simply copy and paste the link from the url bar makes life much easier.
Proclaima
Hey guys, the Title tag makes an excellent upgrade and I'd like to see at least a 45 character count so we can be descriptive as possible. Let's keep it going!
Just to say thank you - this is another fantastic improvement...really look forward to it
Best wishes
Paul
Finally - my inner pages can also get some PR - instead of my home page only !
Thanks MF!
Hi there! is it better to make blogs like the above now that you have changing url's. was wondering if i should have chosen MF - instead of blogger for my blog!
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Hi
Will this URL mod affect my Google listings status? Over the last couple of days, my site has dropped considerably and my sitemap is showing 4 url's restricted by robot.txt and 1 http 403. Seems very strange that my site has almost disappeared from Google?
Thanks Becky
Hi Joe. Hope you are out there and can pick up on something we have touched on before – but I am now confused about.
I am having some issues with some of my sites Google SERPS and Goolge PageRanks and any comments from you here would help with some of my suspicions. My question relates back to the changes made the Sitemaker URLs (touched on in your comment here – no.13).
Essentially I am confused as to what URLs the search engines index and so what URLs we should use for linking purposes. When doing any deep linking I have always in past linked the page name only EG: www.qimarketing.com/advertising
The search engines index the URL with the 'new' number now, apart from the home page which is numberless. EG: www.qimarketing.com/advertising/4523168691
When linking to my site from another site should I be linking with the number or not? I know both methods will actually find the page but I am talking about the effects here on link building. Will this make any difference in your view?
many thanks
Justin