The Urls generated for hosted web site pages contain a dash and numbers at the end. For example:
https://www.hatterasislandvacationrentals.com/oceanfront-homes-573976717
https://www.hatterasislandvacationrentals.com/soundfront-homes-573976734
These Urls seem to work without the numbers, e.g.:
https://www.hatterasislandvacationrentals.com/oceanfront-homes
https://www.hatterasislandvacationrentals.com/soundfront-homes
I have two questions here:
Thanks!
Hey Russ,
Welcome to OwnerRez!
Our Hosted Website platform automatically adds those numbers at the end of the URL so that your pages are resilient against changing slugs (ie. the words or property names in the middle of the URLs). If you change those words, the URL will change, but the old URLs will continue to work because of that number at the end. Any page with that number at the end will go to the correct (ie. numbered) page regardless of the word in front of it.
However, we also smartly detect if the number is missing and check for that page slug as well. So, as you correctly detected, if the number is missing, OwnerRez will still honor the slug and find the correct page. Without the number though, any change of the URL slug means that third parties that linked to you won't work because your URL changed.
Does that make sense? 🤔
The "number-less" Urls seem to seamlessly forward to the correct Urls without the dash and numbers. Will sharing the number-less Urls cause any SEO problems?
Number-less URLs will work perfectly fine, and number-less URLs will not negatively impact SEO because our pages contain a canonical element that tells search engines what the official URL is for that page no matter how the browser got there.
However, what might impact SEO if if you use a number-less URL and then it ends up changing by a letter or word and the third party that linked to you now has a broken URL.
Is there any way to make the Urls without the dash and numbers?
Not yet. We've considered adding a general website setting that would allow you to specify that you don't want the auto-numbering, but we haven't done it yet. If that's important for you, consider creating a post in the Feature Request forum and voting for it to see who else wants it too.
I actually just noticed we have built a setting (for using number-less URLs) but it's still in testing and not quite out yet. So there will be an option for this very soon.
I actually just noticed we have built a setting (for using number-less URLs) but it's still in testing and not quite out yet. So there will be an option for this very soon.
Awesome to hear, Paul! Thank you!
Hi Paul,
Any update on number-less URLs release date? Without this, Google is indexing the every page with the number, which isn't the most user-friendly URL to display. If OR starts redirecting to the number-less URL, Google should automatically see this redirect according to their canonical url documentation and update the urls accordingly.
That feature is actually in testing; it will be released in the not too distant future.
Hi, can you update on this?
It's still in testing. We, too, are looking forward to release of that feature.
