Clean quicktab urls required for SEO [#1678816]

I am getting myself a little confused and would appreciate some support.

Lets say I have the following nodes as Panel Pages:

example.com/food-types

example.com/meat

example.com/vegetables

And a quicktabs set called food_tabs containing two tabs; Meat, Vegetables, with Ajax set to 'No': Load all tabs.

I have them arranged as follows:

example.com/food-types has the food_tabs tab set placed at the top of the page in a Panel region. The two tabs display perfectly at this url.

Each tab now has a url as follows:

example.com/food-types?qt-food_tabs=0#qt-food_tabs

and

example.com/food-types?qt-food_tabs=1#qt-food_tabs

Problems/questions:

A. Neither tab actually contains the keyword meat or vegetables since they do not show the url of the page that is allocated to each tab respectively. The quicktabs urls are now actually quite meaningless.

B. Can I set up an alias for example.com/food-types?qt-food_tabs=0#qt-food_tabs so that it reads example.com/food-types/meat?

C. In another issue about canonical urls, I see people DISALLOWING the quicktab urls in Robots to avoid duplicate content. If I do that, they wont get indexed and the only pages indexed will be the original pages, which are not displayed correctly per the Panel Page that contains the tab set. In fact, if the original pages are indexed and a visitors clicks that search result, they will see a page with no tabs at all.

D. So, how do I get the original page, such as example.com/vegetables to display the page example.com/food-types?qt-food_tabs=1#qt-food_tabs (and consequently the tab set)? The only thing i can think of is a redirect to the quicktabs url... but this is the exact url that users recommend we disallow in Robots. And this is the url which looks so ugly for users and contain no keywords.

SOLUTION 1: It seems to me that I need to disallow the urls example.com/meat and example.com/vegetables in Robots and alias the long quicktab urls? This is every manual workaround though? I need to do that for every original node that will later be displayed in a tab?

SOLUTION 2: Perhaps I should leave the original urls to be indexed and then set up a redirect to the long quicktab urls and then alias those long quicktab urls into something more user friendly?

This seems so very complicated.

Comment	File	Size	Author
#20	quick-tabs-clean-quicktab-urls-1678816-20.patch	1022 bytes	anairamzap
#20

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Comments

Comment #1

damban CreditAttribution: damban commented 11 July 2012 at 05:02

Turns out I can't alias the long quicktabs urls at all. "...either invalid or you do not have access to it."

The only option seems to be Solution 2, with no aliasing of the long url. And that means duplicate content.

Comment #2

damban CreditAttribution: damban commented 14 July 2012 at 03:38

Title:

tab urls: I need a little help.

» tab urls and SEO problems: I need a little help

ok so I know my OP is rather long, but I really need some help. Quicktabs is making the way users and spiders interact with my site very confusing for me. And it should be simple.

I did this with a 301 redirect:

SOLUTION 2: Perhaps I should leave the original urls to be indexed and then set up a redirect to the long quicktab urls ~~and then alias those long quicktab urls into something more user friendly?~~

Usng my above example:

example.com/vegetables 301 redirects to example.com/food-types?qt-food_tabs=1#qt-food_tabs. The reason this is mandatory is on my site is because example.com/vegetables must always be presented to google and users in a tab, not as an 'isolated' node with url /vegetables.

I have a brand new site and google has indexed every page EXCEPT the tabbed pages that have a 301 redirect to them as explained. Therefore all my content is ignored as all my content is on tab pages.

This is terrible for SEO.

Please help.

Comment #3

pipicom CreditAttribution: pipicom commented 4 August 2012 at 12:56

Indeed there's a serious SEO issue. It's weird that this hasn't been addressed already.

Comment #4

crimsondryad CreditAttribution: crimsondryad commented 18 August 2012 at 00:39

This issue seems like it is related to this one: http://drupal.org/node/1673532 Because if quicktab paths are cleaned up for SEO, it seems like it would be a fairly simple jump to also making them clean.

I'm also going to cross-post this in the other issue so the efforts are concentrated.

Comment #5

crimsondryad CreditAttribution: crimsondryad commented 20 August 2012 at 14:42

Category:

support

» feature

Kicking this over to a feature request as so far as I can see, there isn't an existing way in the module to have it output clean urls.

We need this as well.

Comment #6

Rhino CreditAttribution: Rhino commented 20 August 2012 at 17:52

I have been using Quicktabs for over a year on users pages to create blocks of their content. Search engines now carry several links to each node I post, with ?quicktab at the end of the URL, causing my site to be punished for duplicate content. I'm turning quicktabs off until this issue is resolved.

Comment #7

leanne9 CreditAttribution: leanne9 commented 15 November 2012 at 16:23

I would also like to see this feature in the next release. Definitely need an easy way in the UI to be able to give the tab a "friendly" term to append to the URL.

For what it's worth, I did find this in the documentation... Add Direct Link to Quick Tab Using Javascript, which doesn't really answer our question but someone might be able to get something out of it...

Comment #8

rattusrattus CreditAttribution: rattusrattus commented 29 May 2013 at 15:30

I'm interested in working on this issue. Has anyone even the beginnings of a patch?

Comment #9

damban CreditAttribution: damban commented 24 June 2013 at 07:48

Almost a year later and I still can not solve this satisfactorily.

Using a 301 redirect appears mandatory, and in doing so, any node displayed on a tab is not indexed by Google.

Comment #10

kingfisher64 CreditAttribution: kingfisher64 commented 26 October 2013 at 20:37

Title:	tab urls and SEO problems: I need a little help	» Clean quicktab urls required for SEO
Version:	7.x-3.4	» 7.x-3.6
Priority:	Normal	» Major

This is so essential to seo. There can be no underscores in url's either as bots read that as one continuous string.

Edit: There is a potential solution but it's not for quicktabs. https://drupal.org/project/field_jquery_tabs does pass the clean url test I ran with this module using http://www.seositecheckup.com.

Comment #11

kingfisher64 CreditAttribution: kingfisher64 commented 23 December 2013 at 21:57

I've given up using quicktabs until this is fixed. Is there any chance any competent programmer can fix this as the mod is in essence unusable (from a seo standpoint) until it's fixed.

Many thanks.

Comment #12

HansKuiters CreditAttribution: HansKuiters commented 28 February 2014 at 19:32

@ #10: I have just tried Field_jquery_tabs. The tabs have this kind of url: /node/6#tabs-0-45741100-1393615741-2
It might be right on clean url but surely not on SEO.

I too would like better seo support for tabs.

Comment #13

HansKuiters CreditAttribution: HansKuiters commented 28 February 2014 at 21:40

This module may be is useful: Node Tab. Use it with panels or with this patch: #2005384: Make it usable without Panels

Comment #14

kingfisher64 CreditAttribution: kingfisher64 commented 11 April 2015 at 18:39

Has any progress been made on this?

As far as I'm aware this is the only views based tabs module but as far as I'm aware it's still very seo unfriendly.

Comment #15

trailscout CreditAttribution: trailscout as a volunteer commented 14 July 2015 at 21:41

Has anyone heard and answer to this. We have most of our content in Quicktabs.

Comment #16

damban CreditAttribution: damban commented 25 July 2015 at 22:51

I'm ditching QT in my next site update. Bad for SEO and complicated for highly adaptable mobile sites.

Comment #17

kingfisher64 CreditAttribution: kingfisher64 commented 26 July 2015 at 11:10

I found a very useful replacement for tabs being inserting into the body. https://www.drupal.org/project/jquery_ui_filter. Tabs, Dialog, Accordon.

Combine that with http://jqueryui.com/themeroller/

For a field based solution https://drupal.org/project/field_jquery_tabs

Thanks Capono #13, node tab without panels looks interesting as well.

Comment #18

RdeBoer

Melbourne

CreditAttribution: RdeBoer as a volunteer commented 1 August 2015 at 04:06

I too love Quicktabs, but am unhappy with the SEO-unfriendly hyperlinks generated for the quicktabs.

Ideally:
1) The tab hyperlinks should not contain underscores
2) The tab hyperlinks should retain the tab names

But we have bigger issues...

AJAX mode ON -- content loaded upon clicking the tab
To avoid "SEO "duplicate content penalties" (in AJAX mode), if the tabs refer to nodes, then the tab hyperlinks should be identical to the (canonical) node URL aliases, or...? However, not sure how this will work out programmatically.

AJAX mode OFF -- content for all tabs is loaded on the page, not visible to human, but visible to crawler!
Does that mean that in this mode we're stuffed when it comes to duplicate content penalties?

Unless we have
Disallow: /*?qt-*
in our robots.txt to not index Quicktab links of the form http://example.com/something?qt-catalog_tabs=1#qt-catalog_tabs

Canonical URL in <head> is part of core in D7.

Looks this may be the way to go? https://developers.google.com/webmasters/ajax-crawling/docs/getting-started

PS: Thanks kingfisher64 for mentioning http://seositecheckup.com -- what a great tool !

Comment #19

RdeBoer

Melbourne

CreditAttribution: RdeBoer as a volunteer commented 1 August 2015 at 18:25

So digging a little deeper.
I'm finding that the query string (the bit after the ?) and the fragment (the bit after the #) aren't necessary at all for correct operation (provided javascript is enabled in the browser, but who hasn't these days?).
The Quicktabs module code registers what list element is clicked and then maps this to the right content.

So with the tiny patch below, I've suppressed query string and fragment. To the bots/crawlers the Quicktab links are simply links to the page you're on. So no need for "no follows" on links or "Disallows" in the robots.txt anymore.

The patch seems to work fine for both the "Yes: Load only the first tab on page view" and "No: Load all tabs on page view." options.

Don't have an official patch as I'm making some other changes too, but here's what you do: simply insert 2 pairs of double slashes:

File .../sites/all/modules/quicktabs/plugins/QuickQuicktabs.inc, function construct_link_options($tabkey):

To remove the query string:
line #149, insert // at the start of the line: //$query["qt-{$qt_name}"] = $tabkey;

To remove the fragment:
line #156, insert // at the start of the line //'fragment' => 'qt-' . $qt_name,

Now all your Quicktabs will still work, but display the current page in their hyperlink, which should be SEO-friendly.

Comment #20

anairamzap

she/her or they/them

Spanish

Buenos Aires

CreditAttribution: anairamzap as a volunteer commented 18 November 2016 at 16:13

Version:	7.x-3.6	» 7.x-3.x-dev
Component:	Miscellaneous	» Code
Status:	Active	» Needs work

File	Size
quick-tabs-clean-quicktab-urls-1678816-20.patch	1022 bytes

Hi, I have created a patch including the changes @RdeBoer mentions in above comment.
Patch was created against 7.x-3.x-dev branch.

I haven't modified anything else, just applied those two commented out lines, in case someone else wants to apply it. With this patch quicktabs urls won't have a hash or fragment.

I tested it only with the views integrations, would be good to test it on nodes or blocks.

Cheers,
m

Comment #21

eFeS CreditAttribution: eFeS commented 30 November 2016 at 21:22

Subscribing.

The supplied "patch" not working, or to be more precise, it does not address the situation.
SEO friendly URLs needs to be in a format something like this:
'qtname/tabtitle', where qtname would be the name of the quicktab instance (this would be the "category" of the given product or food) and tabtitle would be the sub-category, shown as made by the user on the quicktabs settings page.

Comment #22

anairamzap

she/her or they/them

Spanish

Buenos Aires

CreditAttribution: anairamzap as a volunteer commented 1 December 2016 at 15:51

Hey @eFeS, I agree that the patch it doesn't address the SEO friendly url thingy. As outlined in my above comment it just removes the hashed URLs.
Would be lovely to find time to actually "fix" the problem, but the provided patch is a workaround until that day arrives :)

Cheers!