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Allow for a path variable in the tender app location

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vzaar Chief Geek

24 Sep, 2009 10:57 AM

I suspect this is quite hard to do (but what do I know) but it would be invaluable useful.

From an SEO perspective, the FAQs are incredible juice for google, as they contain valuable content (as to a lesser degree the discussions)

However, they sit on http://help.vzaar.com, not http://vzaar.com/help . The problem with this is, that google views subdomains as a separate site and doesn’t transfer the tasty link juice across to the main domain.

We use NGINX to proxy our blog from http://blog.vzaar.net/blog to http://vzaar.com/blog to get around this.

It would be great to do this with Tender App but because things sit at different paths e.g.

• http://help.vzaar.com/home (root)
• http://help.vzaar.com/faqs
• http://help.vzaar.com/discussions
• http://help.vzaar.com/discussion/new

It makes it quite difficult to do.

It would be useful if we could specify a root path (hell it would be useful even if you had a fixed root path) that we could then proxy say
http://help.vzaar.net/help - > http://vzaar.com/help OR http://vzaar.tenderapp.com/help - > http://vzaar.com/help

So all the directories would be something like

• http://help.vzaar.com/help/home (root)
• http://help.vzaar.com/help/faqs
• http://help.vzaar.com/help/discussions
• http://help.vzaar.com/help/discussion/new

etc etc.

Like I said, I know it’s probably a real PITA, but from an SEO perspective it would be very very valuable. And it would be good genuine stuff for search engines, as it is good genuine content.

Thanks
Adrian

1. 1 Posted by rick on 24 Sep, 2009 05:30 PM

   

   That's an interesting idea. If I can do this relatively painlessly without disturbing other users, I will.

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2. 2 Posted by rick on 24 Sep, 2009 06:01 PM

   

   I was afraid of this outcome: it's easy to do for everyone, but not specific people. I hacked in something that I think will work (even if it means I'm going to burn in ruby hell for this). I'll have to test this hardcore before I deploy it.

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3. 3 Posted by vzaar Chief Gee... on 24 Sep, 2009 06:03 PM

   

   If it works I’ll send you your choice of British Ale or European Larger ….

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4. 4 Posted by rick on 29 Sep, 2009 05:21 PM

   

   I'm not an SEO expert or anything, but I always thought subdomains had higher pagerank than subdirectories. And, I thought subdomains were grouped with domains as part of the same 'site'.
   

   Do you have something tracking this right now so we can measure any change in visibility or pagerank?

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5. 5 Posted by vzaar Chief Gee... on 29 Sep, 2009 05:56 PM

   

   Hi Rick,

   Subdomains are essentially websites in their own right and not related to the main domain ranking wise. Here’s a good read on this http://www.seomoz.org/blog/understanding-root-domains-subdomains-vs...

   So help.vzaar.com and vzaar.com are each seen as their own site. Because the help documents are text rich and link worthy in their own right, having them on a subdomain concentrates google juice off our main site and onto the subdomain too. By having it all under vzaar it means all the value of anyone linking to the subdirectory is kept together and equally helps the subpages index better.

   vzaar has a page rank of 4.
   help.vzaar.com has a page rank of 0
   vzaar.com/blog (has a page rank of 3) (and is being proxied from blog.vzaar.net)

   I don’t think we’re a big enough site to see a direct lift in pagerank, as the scale is only 1-10 and you can’t see much change in going form 4.12 to 4.23 for example. But I have several friends who work in SEO and all my discussions with them indicate we should be doing this on a sub directory not a subdomain.

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6. 6 Posted by rick on 30 Sep, 2009 04:30 PM

   

   Hmm, guess I'm on old information then. I'll push out a test later today/tonight for you to play with.

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7. 7 Posted by vzaar Chief Gee... on 04 Oct, 2009 02:25 PM

   

   Hi Rick,

   Sorry was out of email for a few days.

   Let me know when that’s ready and I’ll have a play.

   Adrian

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8. 8 Posted by rick on 05 Oct, 2009 05:08 PM

   

   The last batch of tests didn't go so well. I think I'm committing some ruby sins getting this to work :) I'm at a conference this week so I'll try to get this in later in the week.

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9. 9 Posted by vzaar Chief Gee... on 05 Oct, 2009 05:11 PM

   

   No problems Rick, it’s be fantastic to have but not critical.

   If it works it might make an interesting blog post as I’m sure other ruby app developer would find it useful. All apps seem to have the subdomain style pathing and this could be a popular blog post.

   What conference you at?

   Adr

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10. 10 Posted by System on 09 Oct, 2009 05:55 PM

    

    A Lighthouse ticket was created for this discussion

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11. 11 Posted by rick on 09 Oct, 2009 06:23 PM

    

    > If it works it might make an interesting blog post as I’m sure other ruby app developer would find it useful. All apps seem to have the subdomain style pathing and this could be a popular blog post.
    >
    > What conference you at?

    I'm talking with Josh and Yehuda about making this process easier for
    Rails 3 actually. I may extract the 'relative url root' functionality
    to a rack app or something. The actual process isn't difficult, I
    just had to do some ruby ninja moves to make it work because
    apparently no one has ever attempted to implement it.

    I was at Aloha on Rails. It was a nice break for obvious reasons :)

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12. 12 Posted by vzaar Chief Gee... on 10 Oct, 2009 12:26 PM

    

    because apparently no one has ever attempted to implement it.

    This would explain why all ruby apps do youcompany.webapp.com

    I was at Aloha on Rails. It was a nice break for obvious reasons :)

    Beats rainy London

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13. 13 Posted by rick on 27 Oct, 2009 04:54 PM

    

    So, I quietly deployed this last week to make sure no more weird side effects occurred. Testing brought up lots of weird bugs, Staging brought up some more, but things look fine now in production.

    Let me know if you want me to convert your site today. It takes just a second, and all the old urls will keep working. But if someone goes to http://help.vzaar.com, all links will point at http://help.vzaar.com/help/*.
    

    Right now, help is the only path you can have. Currently I have to symlink these during the deploy process so that all the links to static assets (css, javascript) keep working.

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14. 14 Posted by vzaar Chief Gee... on 27 Oct, 2009 05:23 PM

    

    Rick,

    Can you confirm the new urls will just add a /help to them?

    So everything is exactly the same expect we have the additional /help after it?

    The we can proxy can change the url to help.vzaar.net and proxy http://help.vzaar.net/help/ to vzaar.com/help ?

    Adrian

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15. 15 Posted by rick on 27 Oct, 2009 06:02 PM

    

    Yea, check out my sort-of-abandoned OSS site: http://oss.techno-weenie.net.

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16. 16 Posted by mateusz on 14 Apr, 2010 12:48 PM

    

    Hi Rick,

    I know that this discussion broke like 6 months ago, but could you enable this subdomain stuff for vzaar soon? We would like to map all tender stuff to vzaar.com/help

    Thanks,
    Matt

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17. 17 Posted by Will on 25 Jun, 2010 02:18 AM

    

    Hey Matt. I was going through some old discussions that trailed off and this came up. It should be available on your settings page https://vzaar.tenderapp.com/settings

    http://img.skitch.com/20100625-tmku8tj81sfn9bdsqymay9et5m.png

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18. Will closed this discussion on 25 Jun, 2010 02:22 AM.