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  • Angelo 20 posts 72 karma points
    Aug 24, 2012 @ 23:21
    Angelo
    0

    Shortening the URLs

    Dur to our content structure, our urls are like this:

    http://www.website.com/en/foldername/the-books/thebookname/chapternumber/thefilename.aspx

    We want that this url should work like this:

    http://www.website.com/thefilename.aspx

    I could only manage this with URLREWRITING. The problem is that we have tons of such links and we have to do umbraco database lookup to find the "thebookname/chapternumber" foldernames and then apply the URL scheme.

    This way we get 200 OK and is not any redirect.

    Is there a way in Umbraco where we can define such things easily.

    Thanks.

     

  • Chriztian Steinmeier 2800 posts 8790 karma points MVP 8x admin c-trib
    Aug 25, 2012 @ 14:56
    Chriztian Steinmeier
    0

    Hi Angelo,

    Take a look at the "magic" property umbracoUrlAlias for a way to accomplish this.

    Define that on your DocumentType and fill in the desired shortcut on the individual nodes, e.g.: thefilename in your example above - and Umbraco will serve that node's content on that URL.

    To prevent searchbots (i.e. Google :-) from flagging those as duplicate content, you can put a rel="canonical" (check Google for exact syntax) on the page, where you use the URL you get from NiceUrl() to tell the bot what the real URL is... 

    /Chriztian

  • Angelo 20 posts 72 karma points
    Aug 25, 2012 @ 16:20
    Angelo
    0

    Hi Chriztian,

    Wow, that's great! It's working wonderfully.  Two question related to this:

    One concern: www.site.com/filename and www.site.com/filename.aspx both works. Can't we somehow make only .aspx work. In the config files use directory mode is set to false already. 

    This way we get 3 duplicate URLs. What do you suggest for this? I was thinking to write URL rewriting to 301 redirect original url to this urlaliasurl.

    One problem I have is that we will have such thousands of URLs. Now, if we change the name of one URL, the old one will direct to 404. So, for this, I have to again create the code for the save event to record urlalias changes and store them in the 301 redirection bank.

    I found this tool: http://our.umbraco.org/projects/developer-tools/301-url-tracker which looked great but it only works automatically for umbracoUrlName variable.

    Can this or something else work for "umbracoUrlAlias" also?

    Thanks a lot for your help.

  • Chriztian Steinmeier 2800 posts 8790 karma points MVP 8x admin c-trib
    Aug 25, 2012 @ 22:24
    Chriztian Steinmeier
    0

    Hi Angelo,

    If you can, I'd recommend you enable the "directory" URLs - the .aspx suffix is just annoying to use when giving somebody a URL - it's much better to just say: "Go to mysite dot com slash goodies" and not have to say "dot aspx" too.

    If you want to keep it like you do now (with the .aspx) it would probably be a good idea to add a URL rewrite for URLs without .aspx and route them to the .aspx version (one single generic rewrite). That way you could still use the .aspx-less version when handing out URLs — all internal URLs handled by Umbraco will be correct anyway, so no need to worry about those. 

    Regarding the duplicate URLs - that's why I mentioned creating a "CanonicalURL" macro to put in the <head> section of your Master. If you use that, you shouldn't be getting duplicate content on Google because it makes sure to always index the page on a single URL. 

    The problem with renaming pages — maybe take a look at 301 Moved Permanently - a package that works much like the umbracoUrlAlias, you create a special property and when you rename a page, you put the old name in that property, so Umbraco can find the page anyway and serve the 301 header.

    /Chriztian

  • Angelo 20 posts 72 karma points
    Aug 27, 2012 @ 04:43
    Angelo
    0

    Thank you so much for your reply. All clear :) Great tips!

    Love,
    Angelo 

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