Dolphin SEO - what a joke.

Just got some press for my site in a magazine - great, can't wait for the hit's to come rolling in, it's always good to get free publicity - especially when it's from a national magazine.

EXCEPT...

Dolphin 7 Url's are different from Dolphin 6 Url's -huh?? WTF??

I just noticed that updating to Dolphin 7 has broken pretty much every single indexed link in my site.

Now. Instead of...

http://www.mysite.com/video/video-published-in-the-magazine

I have ...

http://www.mysite.com/m/video/video-published-in-the-magazine

WTF??? WHY?????????

This is absolute stupidity, and just reinforces how little Boonex know about SEO (apart from the very obvious fact that there are ZERO tools to help with SEO included with Dolphin).

I can understand that this new url structure fits in with the new 'modular' way of doing things ('m' is obviously for module - which is another joke altogether). But there is absolutely NO reason for changing this in this case. Whoever decided to completely revise the URL structure very obviously does not run a website of their own - and if they do - it's not one that ranks particularly highly.

I will actually go as far as to say that the coders are complete amateurs. Yes there are some nice coding hooks, but there is nothing cutting edge about Dolphin, and the more I look at it, dolphin is simply the crazed musings of someone who does not know what they are doing. changing the URL structure is a fundamental NO-NO. WTF are you thinking???

There are many considerations when updating something like Dolphin, and one of those considerations is data integrity - maintaining the existing sites data without too much disruption. I can understand that the new gallery features require a different way of processing the existing information, as galleries were not present in Dolphin 6, but if it absolutely HAS to be changed, the old data should still be supported with legacy features - such as retaining old links. Easy enough to do with some mod_rewrite rules, but in this case, not even considered  - it was not even on the developers radar - they are very obviously completely unaware of the implications of the change that they have made.

My site is not a particularly large site, but there are still nearly a thousand photos in it - that's a thousand links that are now broken - a big effin headache for a site that promotes free photo hosting - and this is not to mention the videos and the rest of the site.

I am now completely dismayed with the developers here, and I call you out to come and defend the decision to make this change - right here in this blog. But I mostly annoyed at myself - and the fact that I stupidly upgraded from D6 - a D6 where I fixed some 50/60 odd bugs so that the damn thing worked - my recommendation for those running a D6 site

DO NOT UPGRADE TO D7!!

It will break any rankings that you have built up, you will have to start again from scratch.

However, I really should not be surprised - it was only a blog post or two ago that I complained that D7 would eventually end up the same way as D6 when D8 rolls around - forgotten about, and unsupported. Well this further reinforces this view. Unfortunately, I do not think that this is done maliciously, it is done out of sheer stupidity.

/DM