Hi There. I'm an online marketing guy that knows very little about web development. My past work has seen me primarily using Wordpress or Silverstripe as a CMS, and I've just taken up a new contractr with an Umbraco site. Great CRS, enjoying finding my way around!
One problem I've run into is how URL redirects work. For example, in Wordpress if I had a URL like the following:
www.umbraco.com/page-example
and changed the URL to
www.umbraco.com/page-exampleee
When you go to www.umbraco.com/page-example, you would be redirected to www.umbraco.com/page-exampleee
With Umbraco, this doesn't seem to be the case. Rather I end up with a 404 error.
Bit of background, the website I'm working with is a tour website. All of their tour pages have Safari in the URL instead of Tour, so I'm wanting to change these from an SEO perspective, but don't want any inbound links we have to the Safari version to be broke!
When you are change a URL in Umbraco e.g www.umbraco.com/page-example to www.umbraco.com/page-exampleee Umbraco does not automatic redirect you to www.umbraco.com/page-exampleee, as you already has experienced you will get a 404 page, becauseyour www.umbraco.com/page-exampleee does not exist anymore in the content tree.
But there are some package that can help you with SEO. One of these packages are 301 URL tracker http://our.umbraco.org/projects/developer-tools/301-url-tracker With this package will be able to manage URLs within Umbraco. It automatically tracks URL changes, for instance when a node is renamed, and makes sure the old URL will redirect to the new location. This is great for SEO and great for people visiting your website via this old URL. Search engines will update the indexed URL and people won't visit the old, broken URL. You can also create your own redirects, based on a simple URL or using a Regex pattern. You can redirect to an existing node or a manually entered URL. This is great for migrating existing indexed URLs to your new website!
Anohter great package when you are working with SEO in a Umbraco website, would be the SEO checker from Soeteman Software http://soetemansoftware.nl/seo-checker SEO checker helps youfind common SEO issues on your website such as missing meta tags, broken links etc. SEO checker allows you to fix issues on the page before publishing the page. and so on.
I assume that you are using the Google analytics in your work, and there are a package for Umbraco so it´s possible for you to integrate Google Analytics into to the Umbraco backoffice, I don´t know if you find it very handy, but you can take a look at the package here: http://our.umbraco.org/projects/backoffice-extensions/analytics (If you are using Umbraco 7 or newer).
Since you are new to the Umbraco CMS, and as you said are online marketing guy that knows very little about web development, then I think that you need a technical person that can install, at least the 301 URL tracker package for you.
New Umbraco user - how do URL redirects work?
Hi There. I'm an online marketing guy that knows very little about web development. My past work has seen me primarily using Wordpress or Silverstripe as a CMS, and I've just taken up a new contractr with an Umbraco site. Great CRS, enjoying finding my way around!
One problem I've run into is how URL redirects work. For example, in Wordpress if I had a URL like the following:
www.umbraco.com/page-example
and changed the URL to
www.umbraco.com/page-exampleee
When you go to www.umbraco.com/page-example, you would be redirected to www.umbraco.com/page-exampleee
With Umbraco, this doesn't seem to be the case. Rather I end up with a 404 error.
Bit of background, the website I'm working with is a tour website. All of their tour pages have Safari in the URL instead of Tour, so I'm wanting to change these from an SEO perspective, but don't want any inbound links we have to the Safari version to be broke!
Thanks in advance for your help.
Hi Matt and welcome to our,
When you are change a URL in Umbraco e.g www.umbraco.com/page-example to www.umbraco.com/page-exampleee Umbraco does not automatic redirect you to www.umbraco.com/page-exampleee, as you already has experienced you will get a 404 page, because your www.umbraco.com/page-exampleee does not exist anymore in the content tree.
But there are some package that can help you with SEO. One of these packages are 301 URL tracker http://our.umbraco.org/projects/developer-tools/301-url-tracker With this package will be able to manage URLs within Umbraco. It automatically tracks URL changes, for instance when a node is renamed, and makes sure the old URL will redirect to the new location. This is great for SEO and great for people visiting your website via this old URL. Search engines will update the indexed URL and people won't visit the old, broken URL.
You can also create your own redirects, based on a simple URL or using a Regex pattern. You can redirect to an existing node or a manually entered URL. This is great for migrating existing indexed URLs to your new website!
Anohter great package when you are working with SEO in a Umbraco website, would be the SEO checker from Soeteman Software http://soetemansoftware.nl/seo-checker SEO checker helps you find common SEO issues on your website such as missing meta tags, broken links etc. SEO checker allows you to fix issues on the page before publishing the page. and so on.
I assume that you are using the Google analytics in your work, and there are a package for Umbraco so it´s possible for you to integrate Google Analytics into to the Umbraco backoffice, I don´t know if you find it very handy, but you can take a look at the package here: http://our.umbraco.org/projects/backoffice-extensions/analytics (If you are using Umbraco 7 or newer).
Since you are new to the Umbraco CMS, and as you said are online marketing guy that knows very little about web development, then I think that you need a technical person that can install, at least the 301 URL tracker package for you.
Here a some documentation on how to install a package on Umbraco CMS. http://our.umbraco.org/wiki/how-tos/packages-and-projects/how-to-install-a-package maybe you can do it yourself if you have access to the developer section in the Umbraco backoffice.
Hope this helps,
/Dennis
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