SEO-friendly Help Desk Article URLs

[Paulus50]

Hello Forum Members,

Help Desk broadly consists of the "ticketing system" and the "knowledgebase".

With regards to the knowkedgebase, I see that articles are generated with URLS such as:

http://www.hesk.com/demo/knowledgebase.php?article=2

but I would prefer a SEO optinized URL perhaps like :

http://www.hesk.com/demo/knowledgebase. ... -code.html

This is not a criticism of this excellent software, merely my preference.

Does anyone know if there's a URL re-write tweak in Administration which I overlooked?.

Or perhaps available as a URL re-write add on for HESK?

I''ll appreciate any and all help or advice.

Regards,

Paul from Melbourne australia.

[Klemen]

There is no such HESK feature or mod that I know of. I will not give any promises, but will consider this for the future.

One problem to consider with such URLs would for example be what happens when the article subject changes completely.

For what it's worth, I believe days when keywords in the URL were considered an important SEO ranking factor are long gone.

[ASG]

Came here looking for the SEO -friendly support for KB articles. Sorry for reviving an old thread.

FWIW, this requirement is something that is still valid today, even 6 years after this thread was created. Google has specific guidelines on how to go about URL structure, and friendly URLs come on top of the instructions. Here''s a link:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/a ... ic=9460495

In addition, since we are not able to incorporate Meta Title and Meta Description to the KB articles, we lose all control on how the article is displayed on the Search Engine result page. So we have no control over display URL, display Title, display description on search ranking page, which may also lead to a very inferior user experience, and user may not even click the link at all. Not to mention, a LOT of content updated in KB is not leveraged for SEO.

I could go on an on about advantages it offers, but the crux is if Google thinks it is important, it probably is.

One problem to consider with such URLs would for example be what happens when the article subject changes completely.

Well, this is a user problem. The onus is on user to create a new article in such a case, or update the current one's SEO-URL to match the article subject. All other major CMS's like Wordpress, Opencart, mediaWikis have the same principle.

[Klemen]

Hi,

I read through the linked article and my conclusion is it doesn't apply here. The article specifically talks about overly complex URLs with multiple parameters, that can cause problems for crawlers by creating unnecessarily high numbers of URLs that point to identical or similar content on your site.

Hesk KB articles don't do that. They have a single ID parameter and no other parameters (that would create duplicate URLs) appended.

Feel free to modify your Hesk to generate "SEO-friendly" URLs (or hire a programmer to do so), but unfortunately, this is not very high on our "to do" list.


P.s.: to give you a real-life example that Hesk KB articles are indeed SEO-friendly and modern search engines have no problems indexing and ranking them, go to Google, search for gmail POP3 and see what site ranks very high among results