SEO URL settings are so broken that not even WHMCS uses them!!!

[yggdrasil 112]

After fighting the SEO URLs new routing on templates for years, in December I decided to move my WHMCS installation out of its subdirectory because WHMCS officially said to me once they don't support WHMCS with another CMS that uses or routes index.php (which makes no sense because .htaccess are per directory)...

Long story short, this did not fix anything !!! At all!!! The issues are the same. Regardless if it sits on its own subdomain, domain or folder. No difference.

This week I decided to finally enable the tag features in the knowledge base articles, I never used them because like many other missing things they are not multilanguage in WHMCS. You can make articles for each language, but tags are global which is messy when someone changes the language and then has tags in English only.

For my surprise, the tag links on my site don't work either with the fully friendly settings. They work on WHMCS websites like here:

Knowledgebase | WHMCS

But it works because not even WHMCS is using the friendly URL settings on their own installation!? 

If you look at the URL they include the index.php, and they are not using their own rules. Let me guess? Because it breaks so many things...

Almost 3 years later still not fixed...why did they move to Laravel on version 6 and destroyed path and links...Is there ever going to be a fix for this? I have now searched on Google for other sites using WHMCS, I could not one, NOT A SINGLE one that has the fully friendly URL settings enabled. How come? The reason I searched is to test if that site had all links working or it had the same bugs I have. Yet, I cannot find one. Seriously no joke. Not a single site. Can someone find one? I want to seriously test that site and see if the links work for everything.

[Kian 331]

Just give up. Even if you manage to get it working, you have to understand the following.

These are not SEO-Friendly URLs. Let's have a look at the URL you just linked. Let me show you how terrible it is:

• https://www.whmcs.com/members/index.php/knowledgebase/50/Oh-and-twisted-thoughts-that-spin.html
• https://www.whmcs.com/members/index.php/knowledgebase/50/Round-my-head.html
• https://www.whmcs.com/members/index.php/knowledgebase/50/Im-spinning.html
• https://www.whmcs.com/members/index.php/knowledgebase/50/Oh-Im-spinning.html
• https://www.whmcs.com/members/index.php/knowledgebase/50/How-quick-the-sun-can-drop-away.html

I can create an unlimited number of URLs, the same article always opens. Have fun with duplicate content. It doesn't even detect lowercase and uppercase letters meaning that Hello.html, HELLO.html, HeLlO.html, heLLo.html (...) according to Google are all "unique" URLs. And the .html at the very end makes no sense. This "tecnique" was already a SEO myth more than a decade ago. Go figure out 🤔

Not to say I can exploit this flaw to trash your online reputation since I can create URLs containing words like s-cam, viagra, porn. They will work as normal in the URL.

As for multi-language, who cares that such URLs are not multi-language? Search engines can only "see" your WHMCS in default language. Your translations are not crawable nor indexable because WHMCS language is based on PHP sessions. Crawlers don't use session therefore your site will only be indexed in default language.

But, above all, as I said tens of times in other threads, SEO Friendly URLs are a minor ranking factor. Even if you manage to get perfect SEO URLs, your rankings will probably improve by 1%. Perhaps I'm being a bit too optimistic as WHMCS has many more anti-SEO stuff in place.

 

Edited February 15 by Kian

[brian! 3257]

8 hours ago, yggdrasil said:

I have now searched on Google for other sites using WHMCS, I could not one, NOT A SINGLE one that has the fully friendly URL settings enabled. How come? The reason I searched is to test if that site had all links working or it had the same bugs I have. Yet, I cannot find one. Seriously no joke. Not a single site. Can someone find one? I want to seriously test that site and see if the links work for everything.

just did a quick check of my forums users bookmarks, specifically the A's, and could find four (one of which is marked as nulled) that are possibly using FFR... I could find many more using either of the other two settings... with well two dozen more no longer seeming to be using WHMCS. ⚰️

 

[yggdrasil 112]

On 2/15/2021 at 12:33 PM, Kian said:

Just give up. Even if you manage to get it working, you have to understand the following.

These are not SEO-Friendly URLs. Let's have a look at the URL you just linked. Let me show you how terrible it is:

• https://www.whmcs.com/members/index.php/knowledgebase/50/Oh-and-twisted-thoughts-that-spin.html
• https://www.whmcs.com/members/index.php/knowledgebase/50/Round-my-head.html
• https://www.whmcs.com/members/index.php/knowledgebase/50/Im-spinning.html
• https://www.whmcs.com/members/index.php/knowledgebase/50/Oh-Im-spinning.html
• https://www.whmcs.com/members/index.php/knowledgebase/50/How-quick-the-sun-can-drop-away.html

I can create an unlimited number of URLs, the same article always opens. Have fun with duplicate content. It doesn't even detect lowercase and uppercase letters meaning that Hello.html, HELLO.html, HeLlO.html, heLLo.html (...) according to Google are all "unique" URLs. And the .html at the very end makes no sense. This "tecnique" was already a SEO myth more than a decade ago. Go figure out 🤔

Not to say I can exploit this flaw to trash your online reputation since I can create URLs containing words like s-cam, viagra, porn. They will work as normal in the URL.

As for multi-language, who cares that such URLs are not multi-language? Search engines can only "see" your WHMCS in default language. Your translations are not crawable nor indexable because WHMCS language is based on PHP sessions. Crawlers don't use session therefore your site will only be indexed in default language.

But, above all, as I said tens of times in other threads, SEO Friendly URLs are a minor ranking factor. Even if you manage to get perfect SEO URLs, your rankings will probably improve by 1%. Perhaps I'm being a bit too optimistic as WHMCS has many more anti-SEO stuff in place.

 

Who cares about SEO? You always reply the same when I post this. Let me refrain this for once, I DON'T CARE about SEO but URL's working 😂. When I mean the SEO URL settings are broken I mean they don't work and I just call them SEO because that is what WHMCS describes them in the settings. I seriously don't care about search engines but having URL's I can mentally remember. When I refer to them as not working, they don't go to the page they should when you click them. Example, if you click on a tag in the KB articles page it does nothing. It will not filter the KB articles by the clicked tag but just load the normal KB home page. This is a far bigger issue, because it means links are broken.

[CodeCo 1]

WHMCS's "Full Friendly Rewrite" works completely fine for me, and many other people I know who use WHMCS. I think you're misconfiguring it.

[yggdrasil 112]

4 hours ago, CodeCo said:

WHMCS's "Full Friendly Rewrite" works completely fine for me, and many other people I know who use WHMCS. I think you're misconfiguring it.

Could you send me your site link via a private message in case you don't want to make it public? I have a really hard time believing it and I would like to see how your link structures looks like.

[CodeCo 1]

On 2/17/2021 at 11:36 PM, yggdrasil said:

Could you send me your site link via a private message in case you don't want to make it public? I have a really hard time believing it and I would like to see how your link structures looks like.

I'm fine with it being public. https://dashflo.net 

At one point I handled friendly URLs completely custom on my side using a lot of rewrite rules, so things like /service/<id>/cancel etc but as of right now it's nearly all just WHMCS handled friendly URLs. The whole website runs on top of WHMCS. 

[yggdrasil 112]

11 hours ago, CodeCo said:

I'm fine with it being public. https://dashflo.net 

At one point I handled friendly URLs completely custom on my side using a lot of rewrite rules, so things like /service/<id>/cancel etc but as of right now it's nearly all just WHMCS handled friendly URLs. The whole website runs on top of WHMCS. 

Thanks for sharing.  Nice design!

Do tags work? I don't think you are using them. You do seems to run custom rules. Your articles only display by number like:

knowledgebase/240

Instead of:

knowledgebase/240/article-here-title

[brian! 3257]

6 hours ago, yggdrasil said:

Do tags work? I don't think you are using them. You do seems to run custom rules.

I would suspect that is the custom template - if you switch the template to Six, then you can see the cloud tag sidebar and the kb pages ending in .html

https://dashflo.net/knowledgebase/?systpl=six

[yggdrasil 112]

6 hours ago, brian! said:

I would suspect that is the custom template - if you switch the template to Six, then you can see the cloud tag sidebar and the kb pages ending in .html

https://dashflo.net/knowledgebase/?systpl=six

Indeed, thanks!

[yggdrasil 112]

On 2/19/2021 at 1:45 PM, CodeCo said:

I'm fine with it being public. https://dashflo.net 

At one point I handled friendly URLs completely custom on my side using a lot of rewrite rules, so things like /service/<id>/cancel etc but as of right now it's nearly all just WHMCS handled friendly URLs. The whole website runs on top of WHMCS. 

Are you running the default WHMCS provided .htaccess rules?

[Ithiel 18]

On 2/16/2021 at 1:33 AM, Kian said:

Just give up.

Starting to wonder if this is @Kian's general approach to supporting his (paying) clients too. 😕

Even when he says he will actually look into things, he goes radio silent for a month (or six) - all the while providing indepth support for random WHMCS Community posts instead of looking after the people who buy his products/services.

[brian! 3257]

4 hours ago, Ithiel said:

Starting to wonder if this is kian's general approach to supporting his (paying) clients too. 😕

are you still chasing a working solution from him ?

[Ithiel 18]

5 hours ago, brian! said:

are you still chasing a working solution from him ?

yuuup :'-(

I finally managed to get a reply back on Jan 20th (below) where he begrudgingly promised to look into it (while also complaining that he was spending too much time supporting other vendors products instead of his own), but then refused to actually reply to the new ticket he instructed me to create.

 

 

At this point, it seems pretty clear that he is more interested in playing the victim card and posting random community support posts on the WHMCS Forums instead of actually doing the job people paid him for (even when they offer him more money to actually do it). I just want my affiliate program to function correctly. Hell, it functioning at all would be an improvement.

 

Fortunatly, WHMCS Support have said that as long as I keep it classy, I'm welcome to chase him across the forums and hound him to fix the problem as much as I see fit... so I guess that's my life now. 😕

[CodeCo 1]

On 2/20/2021 at 11:49 PM, yggdrasil said:

Are you running the default WHMCS provided .htaccess rules?

No, we have custom Nginx rules though it should be the the equivalent of what the htaccess rule would do.

I've been working on our template since WHMCS 7.4. I found that URLs are prettier without that awful useless .html at the end, and simply changing that from the theme works.

[yggdrasil 112]

6 hours ago, CodeCo said:

No, we have custom Nginx rules though it should be the the equivalent of what the htaccess rule would do.

I've been working on our template since WHMCS 7.4. I found that URLs are prettier without that awful useless .html at the end, and simply changing that from the theme works.

Actually my rules remote the extra .html at the end because that is how it worked before WHMCS 7.

[brian! 3257]

15 hours ago, Ithiel said:

Fortunatly, WHMCS Support have said that as long as I keep it classy, I'm welcome to chase him across the forums and hound him to fix the problem as much as I see fit... so I guess that's my life now. 😕

I see his products are listed again in Marketplace, with a few more 1 star reviews... so I don't think you're alone.

i'm forever being asked to fix his free hooks too - they can be more hassle to fix than it would be to write my own solutions from scratch!

anyway, I assume he's on holiday at the moment as he hasn't logged in for over a week. 🏖️

[Ithiel 18]

13 hours ago, brian! said:

anyway, I assume he's on holiday at the moment as he hasn't logged in for over a week. 🏖️

He just replied!!! Oh my word, he replied!

@Kian has investigated the issue and posted an update to my ticket. He's made a number of fixes, and while there are still some bugs (most minor but one is a show-stopper), we are SIGNIFICANTLY closer to a resolution.

Hopefully he can address these last little bits quickly, and we'll finally be up and running. I am literally giddy with excitement at the thought of having this matter resolved. 😄