Combining permalinks & aliases

support
1

my company website has been live for many years with the address pattern for our blog posts as /blog/slug

i am told by our dev that it is better for SEO to just have /slug

i can do this with:

[permalinks]
    blog = "/:slug"

but then all of my existing blog post links get a 404 error. it seems like aliases are the best approach.

my thought was to do this to every blog post:

+++
...other params...
aliases = "/blog/:slug"
+++

but that doesn’t appear to work. maybe i’m not calling the slug variable properly.

any ideas for a functional equivalent to what i’m trying to accomplish? (i’d rather not have to type out the alias for every single blog post.)

thanks!

2

This might save you some time:
https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/200172286-Configuring-URL-forwarding-or-redirects-with-Cloudflare-Page-Rules

3

appreciate it, thank you! that was my backup option if there is no elegant way to do in hugo.

4

You want to handle this on the server side.

5

can you explain your thought process on why it is better to handle w/ DNS than Hugo?

my understanding was that 301s get penalized by search engines. since the purpose of the permalink would be to help SEO, i thought maybe a hugo alias (relevant code below for ease of reference) would be more SEO friendly than a 301 - but I really know nothing about what is considered a best practice.

(this is what the alias is doing, from the docs)

    <meta name="robots" content="noindex">
    <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; url=https://example.com/posts/my-intended-url"/>
6

No. Per JohnMu of Google:

No, Google won't penalize a site for having 15 redirects (or any other number).

— 🐄 John 🐄 (@JohnMu) February 21, 2021

I prefer server side URL rewrites because:

  1. I can control all of my redirects in one place, tersely.
  2. I can set the response code (301, 302, 307, 308) as desired.

One or two redirects? Fine, use meta refresh. Else, handle it on the server.

1 Like
7

Penalizing redirects would be a bit like the IRS sending you a bill for updating your mailing address. You have something that both organizations want; you are helping them by telling them how to get it.