Reader-Friendly URLs for Subsections
Note
Reader-friendly URLs for subsections is only supported by HTML5 help centers.
With Paligo's Reader-friendly fragment identifiers (hash links) feature, you can have subsections that use a text URL instead of a unique ID (UUID). The text URLs are easier for people to understand, and so are better for when you need to share links to your HTML pages.
For example, if the UUID is used for creating the URL of a subsection, you get a URL like this:
Where the link targets the subsection by using the hashtag (#) followed by the UUID of the subsection's section element.
But if you enable the Reader-friendly fragment identifiers feature, the URL will use the text of the title element instead of the UUID, like this:
Note
URLs for subsections are also known as "hash links", as there is a hashtag # in the structure of the URL.
To set up SEO-friendly and reader-friendly URLs:
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Select Layout in the top menu.
Paligo displays a list of Layouts. The list is empty if there are no custom Layouts in your Paligo instance.
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Select the Layout you want to update or Create a Layout.
Tip
You can copy the URL of the Layout Editor and paste it into a new tab in your browser. This can be useful if you frequently switch between your Paligo content and the Layout settings.
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Select General in the sidebar.
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Enable the SEO-friendly output file names feature.
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Enable or disable the Reader-friendly fragment identifiers (hash links) setting. (HTML5 Help Center Layouts only).
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Set to Enable to use text URLs.
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Set to Disable if you prefer to use the UUIDs for hashtag identifiers.
Important
For HTML5 Help Center outputs, you need to enable both SEO-friendly output file names and Reader-friendly fragment identifiers (hash links).
Note
Reader-friendly fragment identifiers is disabled by default, so that it does not affect any Paligo customers who want to continue using UUID in hash links.
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If you have previously shared links that used the UUID in the URL, you can choose to continue supporting them. The URLs with UUIDs will still work, even though the URL for the subsection will use reader-friendly text instead of the UUID.
Use Preserve legacy anchors if using reader-friendly fragment identifiers to choose whether links with UUIDs will continue to work.
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Set to Enable to preserve the UUIDs so that links will continue to work.
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Set to Disable to lose the UUID, so that only links to the new reader-friendly text version of the link will work.
Note
If you preserve the UUID, it does not mean that the UUID is used in the URL (the UUID is still in the topic, hidden in the code, but it is not part of the URL). The URL will use the new reader-friendly version. If you use the copy to link feature, the copy will also use the reader-friendly URL.
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Select Save.
When you use the layout to publish your content, your chosen settings will be applied to the HTML output.
Note
If you have a publication that contains multiple topics or sections with the same title, you would get duplicate hash fragment identifiers.
If you have such duplicates, Paligo will add a suffix to differentiate them. The suffix is generated from the id of the second topic/section. But you can avoid using suffixes by manually providing a reader-friendly fragment identifier. To do this, use the xinfo:outname attribute on the
section element of each duplicate topic/section.