Pages vs Custom Taxonomy Archives

  • Hi guys,

    I am trying to get the exact same site structure as this site https://theculturetrip.com/

    I have categories set up (restaurants, hotels, travel, etc.)

    I also created a hierarchal taxonomy for Places (so I can mark posts as Continent, Country, and City)

    I want to be able to click on a continent, and then it shows for example, Europe and all the posts in Europe split into the categories (restaurants, hotels, travel, etc) I want the same for countries and cities.

    My first question is, should I create a new page for every single continent, country, and city? This would result in hundreds of pages, and would be quite time consuming. Or is it better to create a custom archive page that has the query logic to pull the correct posts? Which is proper site structure/better practice/better for SEO? Or can somebody help me with a better solution for this?

    I would so much appreciate any help!

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  • Moderator bcworkz

    (@bcworkz)

    No, do not create hundreds of static pages, that would be insane! ??

    The content generated definitely should be dynamically generated. What’s best for SEO is you have a unique URL for each situation. Search bots have no way to know if the hundreds of URLs lead to hundreds of static pages or a single dynamic page, nor do they care. What’s important is each unique URL results in unique content. If any different URL results in the exact same content, a canonical URL should be established in a meta tag telling bots what the preferred, official URL is for that particular content.

    You can pass the selected attributes as URL parameters: example.com/?continent=europe&country=france&city=paris&place=restaurants
    You just need to white list the URL parameters as query vars, but this is not very good for SEO. Better is to incorporate all variables into a permalink style URL:
    example.com/find-places/europe/france/paris/restaurants/
    For this you would need to establish a consistent URL structure and add a custom rewrite rule that converts this permalink style into the previous URL parameter style. Then the white listed query vars can be properly parsed into a query with a callback to the “pre_get_posts” action.

    The “find-places” part of the URL would exist for all URLs that return any “places” sort of content, which allows the rewrite rule to recognize that a particular structure follows. Otherwise it’s almost impossible to create a rewrite rule that will not conflict with other rules.

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