Is it possible to replace the colon after `category:` with a slash in URLs?

Hey,

Kirby builds URLs with the terms “category:” or “tag:” using a colon as a separator, that’s unusual and maybe not SEO friendly, so I expect some issue with Googlebot or other crawlers. It could be challenging to index these pages.
Have you difficulties to get a good position with these pages in the Google search engine? Do you think Google penalizes you if your page URL use colons in place of slashes?

Cheers

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I use such parameters on my blog and google indexes them just fine, although I would love to know how to add a meta description for the tag pages. Currently googles index just has a nice title for the tag, it claims it cant read the rest of page but i have nothing set to prevent it.

Looks like what you want is already on the forum.

I am comforted to see that this type of URL hasn’t any problem regarding SEO.
So according to you, it’s not useful to replace or remove the “category:” part from URL. The search engines correctly crawl these URLs. Except, if I prefer a more conventional URL scheme.
The link you pointed gives way to remove the “tag:” part, so I guess the same method can be used to remove the “category:” part.
Thanks

Well i guess its a question of vanity :slight_smile: Personally it doesnt bother me that the URL looks that way, and its a valid URL, so search engine crawlers should have no issue with it. However, if you prefer a cleaner looking URL, then that post above will help you, and yes i imagine you can just replace all occurrences of tag with category to have it work with that parameter.

Personally, it does not bother me either. But I anticipate the questions my client might ask me when he will see these URLs.
Anyway, you pointed a good question about adding meta title and description to the categories or tags pages. Maybe something to add to the next Kirby version.

Not sure what you mean with “adding to next Kirby”? Since Kirby is non-opinionated about templating, you will always have to build this yourself into your template.

FYI: that’s already something you should be able to do today, with conditional logic around your description meta & title tag.

And whilst you’re at it, be wary about duplicate content too. You might need to setup canonical url’s as well.

I probably should have been a bit clearer - I actually have all that in place, but for some reason google is refusing to read anything but the title for those pages… https://hashandsalt.com/blog/tag:Opinion