SEO Friendly URL in CakePHP Pagination

By default, CakePHP Pagination will have “page:X” in the URL where X is the page number (except the first page). Many SEO expert feel that this type of URL is not SEO friendly. From webmaster point of view, this kind of URL doesn’t look nice too.

Let’s take an example, by default we will have pagination URL like this

http://www.website.com/post
http://www.website.com/post/page:2
http://www.website.com/post/page:3
...

we would like to change it to

http://www.website.com/post
http://www.website.com/post/page/2
http://www.website.com/post/page/3
...

We have to modify 3 files to get this done

1. /app/Config/routes.php

Add or modify the existing route to

Router::connect('/post/page/:page', array(
    'controller' => 'post',
    'action' => 'index'
), array(
    'pass' => array(
        'page'
    ),
    'page' => '[\d]+'
));

2. /app/Controller/PostsController.php

Add or modify the existing controller to

public function index($page = 1) {
    // ...
    $this->request->params['named']['page'] = $page;
    // ...
}

3. /app/View/Posts/index.ctp

Add or modify the existing view to

$paginator->options(array(
    'url'=> array(
        'controller' => 'post',
        'action' => 'index'
    )));