KB Main Page and Article Page URL

Overview of Terms

URL (page address, page link)

URL is a unique address (location) of a webpage on the Internet, for example www.echoknowledgebase.com/wordpress-add-ons/

Slug

Slug is the part of a URL which identifies a single page within a website using human-readable keywords:

• Slugs are typically generated automatically by WordPress from a page title but can also be entered or altered manually.
• When WordPress generates a slug it may optimize it for brevity and easy consumption by search engines. For example, a slug for title “This, That & the Other!” will be “this-that-the-other”. Long page titles may also be truncated to keep the final URL to a reasonable length.

• Slugs are generally entirely lowercase with words separated by dashes, for example echoknowledgebase.com/wordpress-add-ons/

Permalink

Permalink is a name for a permanent link (URL) that points to a specific webpage, post, archive, or any other page on a website. It is called permanent because this link should not change even if the underlying page  ID in the database changes.

“Pretty” Permalinks

Pretty permalinks are permanent links that are easy to read and understand and are good for Search Engine Optimization (SEO). For example, in the URL http://www.echoknowledgebase.com/wordpress-add-ons/ the “add-ons” represents easy-to-read part of the link.

Knowledge Base Links and Slugs

Knowledge base home, articles, categories and tags will each have a unique URL (address) for your visitors to access and for search engines like Google to index.

1) Knowledge Base (KB) Home Page

KB Home URL is equal to the URL of the page that contains KB shortcode

2) KB Article

Knowledge base article has its URL address composed of:

<website address> / <KB Articles Base Slug> / <article slug>

where:
<KB Articles Base Slug> is set in the KB configuration page
<article slug> is set in the article edit page

For example, if your website URL is www.example.com, your KB Article Slug is “customer-support-articles,” and your KB article title is “My Article Name,” the full URL to your articles will be:

www.example.com/customer-support-articles/my-article-name

Notes:

• * The initial KB Articles Base Slug is set to “knowledge-base-1”  (where ‘1’ represents the knowledge base ID)
• KB Articles do not have archive

3) KB Categories

Knowledge base category has its URL address composed of:

<site address> / category  / <category slug>    

where:
<category slug> is set in the category edit page, see Categories and Sub-Categories

 Category archive (a list of existing categories) can be accessed at:     <knowledge base slug>/ category /

Other

List of articles from a specific author can be found at <site URL> /author/<username>/

Changing Permalinks, URLs, and Slugs

WARNING: Please consult with your technical or SEO team before making slug changes.

TIP: Do not include sequence numbers in slugs for articles, categories, or sub-categories. In the future, the sequence of articles and categories can change but slugs should stay the same.

When setting up your knowledge base, think carefully about slugs that you want to use for the following:

• Knowledge Base (KB) Home page
• KB Articles Base Slug  – this slug will be part of URL for each KB article
• KB Article slug
• KB Category slug
• KB Tag slug

Once you set page slugs and after you publish your knowledge base articles, all URLs will become visible and indexed by users, other websites, and search engines like Google. You do not want to change these slugs often, as it could affect both your users and your search engine ranking.

If you do need to change slugs then you need to ensure that old slugs are redirected accordingly so that your users and search engines can find them. Typically WordPress does it for you by redirecting old slugs to the new ones.

Changing  slugs for your published Knowledge Base, Article, Category, Sub-Category, or Tag will affect:

• All your website internal links pointing to this specific KB, article, category, and tag
• All external links from other websites pointing to this specific KB, article, category and tag
• Google and Bing rankings (SEO) if not redirected

Some guidelines about changing slugs and permalinks:

• If you need to change a slug you also have to redirect the original URL (website URL + old slug) to the new URL (website URL + new slug).
  • If <KB Article Slug > changes, old links to all articles will have to be redirected.
  • If <article slug> changes, this specific article old link will have to be redirected to the new link.
  • If <category/tag slug> changes, the old link to that category and/or tag will have to be redirected.