This brings me to a bit of important advice to anyone using Freeway ever. Edit your filenames as a part of your design process. Yes, Freeway makes it easy to get started here – the filename is magically decoded from whatever you put in the title tag, but it’s just a starting point – a suggestion to give you an idea when designing your URLs.
After your Title tag and H1 tag, the actual filename of the page is one of them most SEO-rich targets on your optimization schedule. Once you’ve gotten your basic page structure figured out, and well before Google has had a look at the site, you should – no, read MUST – go through every page in your site, look at the filename, (including any folder names) and follow this process while thinking critically about your content and desired audience.
Read the entire URL out loud.
Give yourself a report card on each page. You get negative 10,000 points for any spaces anywhere in the path, and you get +20 points for each natural-language word as separated by either a slash (meaning it’s a folder), a hyphen (meaning you deliberately broke two words out of the URL) or a dot (meaning you’ve reached the end of the human-readable part, and are now stopping to unequivocally tell the machine how to interpret the file).
So how did you do? Freeway, left to its own devices, will score fairly badly. That’s not its fault, or its developers’. As a fully international product, it cannot begin to guess where the words are in your title, or what’s important to you or the people searching for your site in your native language or theirs. This is part of the design process. Freeway also cannot tell you that those two colors should never overlap one another, or that the tie you’ve chosen will look awful on television.
Optimize the heck out the entire path. But don’t go nuts, as some people do, and try to put all of Dostoyevsky’s works in the Location field – you only get 1,024 characters total in the entire path before some legacy devices will give up and show you the door – er, crash.
Now, once you have made a URL, you should never change it. URLs are (or are supposed to be) forever. Once you make one and publish it to the world, it’s like you’ve signed a contract that you will always provide some meaningful content at that URL.
Here’s where editing these filenames in Freeway gives you freedom to change your mind elsewhere in the page or site. Once you have edited the File field at all, you will have broken the (deliberately fragile) link between the Title and auto-generated File value. Freeway will follow your lead from that point forward. But if you never edit that field, Freeway will continue to do the auto-update behavior, leading to breakage in bookmarks and search engine history. Freeway itself will never write an incorrect (internal) URL anywhere – this is why if you change the title on one page, you may see “dirty page” bullets appear next to every other page in the site – this means that the filename, and thus the URL, changed, and all inbound links need to be rewritten to compensate. Search engines and bookmarks aren’t wired in at that level, and so they don’t get the memo that everything changed.
This is why professionals go to such lengths when designing new URL structures (cautiously, deliberately, aware of the long term impact and risks), to write clever redirects and provide layers of correction. It’s so that a visitor with a bookmark from years ago (or simply linked to you from Wikipedia, as is my current issue with one long-running site) will still find what they are looking for.
Walter
On Jun 7, 2014, at 8:58 AM, Justin Easthall wrote:
SORRY - spelling -
Finally set up a 404 page so if they arrive at a dead link it will show a page explaining the page has moved and link back to the home page - like this
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