EnEncodeNameReplacements is not working in sitecore - url

When I create new page with the name containing spaces for eg: My Page in sitecore cm and try to navigate to that page in the browser the space is replaced by %20 like this My%20Page.
I have even added the EncodeNameReplacements in sitecore.config for replacing whitespace with - but its still not working. Someone please give a solution for this.

Very first thing is, we have to make our page URL SEO friendly. So, in Sitecore, we have the freedom to create an item with a name to be used as URL and DisplayName for human understanding. So, I would advise you that you should create pages with a naming convention like 'my-page' or 'contact-us' and set the Display name for that page.
So, using the above approach your URLs will be neat and clean, and SEO friendly.

Related

Get url of Orchard default pages

I am using orchard 1.9 and I am building a service in which I need to get current URL.
I have OrchardServices and from that I can get the URL like so:
_orchardServices.WorkContext.HttpContext.Request.Url.AbsolutePath;
This works like a charm for pages/routes that I have created but when I go to the Login or register page (/Users/Account/LogOn) the absolute URL is / and I can't find anyway to get the URL or at least any indication that I am in the LogOn or Register.
Anyone knows how I could get the full url?
If I understand what your're asking, you could use the ItemAdminLink from the ContentItemExtension class.
You will need to add references to Orchard.ContentManagement, Orchard.Mvc.Html and Orchard.Utility.Extensions, but then you will have access to the #Html and #Url helpers.
From there you will have the ability to get the link to the item using:
#Html.ItemDisplayLink((ContentItem)Model.ContentItem)
The link to the item with the Url as the title using: #Url.ItemDisplayUrl((ContentItem)Model.ContentItem)
And you should get the same for the admin area by using these:
#Html.ItemAdminLink((ContentItem)Model.ContentItem)
#Url.ItemAdminUrl((ContentItem)Model.ContentItem)
They will give you relative paths, e.g. '/blog/blog-post-1', but it sounds like you've already got a partial solution for that sorted, so it would be a matter of combining the two.
Although I'm sure there are (much) better ways of doing it, you could get the absolute URL using:
String.Format("{0}{1}", WorkContext.CurrentSite.BaseUrl, yourRelativeURL);
...but if anyone has a more elegent way of doing it then post a comment below.
Hope that helps someone.

ColdFusion - What's the best URL naming convention to use?

I am using ColdFusion 9.
I am creating a brand new site that uses three templates. The first template is the home page, where users are prompted to select a brand or a specific model. The second template is where the user can view all of the models of the selected brand. The third template shows all of the specific information on a specific model.
A long time ago... I would make the URLs like this:
.com/Index.cfm // home page
.com/Brands.cfm?BrandID=123 // specific brand page
.com/Models.cfm?ModelID=123 // specific model page
Now, for SEO purposes and for easy reading, I might want my URLs to look like this:
.com/? // home page
.com/?Brand=Worthington
.com/?Model=Worthington&Model=TX193A
Or, I might want my URLs to look like this:
.com/? // home
.com/?Worthington // specific brand
.com/?Worthington/TX193A // specific model
My question is, are there really any SEO benefits or easy reading or security benefits to either naming convention?
Is there a best URL naming convention to use?
Is there a real benefit to having a URL like this?
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7113295/sql-should-i-use-a-junction-table-or-not
Use URLs that make sense for your users. If you use sensible URLs which humans understand, it'll work with search engines too.
i.e. Don't do SEO, do HO. Human Optimisation. Optimise your pages for the users of your page and in doing so you'll make Google (and others) happy.
Do NOT stuff keywords into URLs unless it helps the people your site is for.
To decide what your URL should look like, you need to understand what the parts of a URL are for.
So, given this URL: http://domain.com/whatever/you/like/here?q=search_terms#page-frament.
It breaks down like this:
http
what protocol is used to deliver the page
:
divides protocol from rest of url
//domain.com
indicates what server to load
/whatever/you/like/here
Between the domain and the ? should indicate which page to load.
?
divides query string from rest of url
q=search_terms
Between the ? and the # can be used for a dynamic search query or setting.
#
divides page fragment from rest of the url
page-frament
Between the # and the end of line indicates which part of the page to focus on.
If your system setup lets you, a system like this is probably the most human friendly:
domain.com
domain.com/Worthington
domain.com/Worthington/TX193A
However, sometimes a unique ID is needed to ensure there is no ambiguity (with SO, there might be multiple questions with the same title, thus why ID is included, whilst the question is included because it's easier for humans that way).
Since all models must belong to a brand, you don't need both ID numbers though, so you can use something like this:
domain.com
domain.com/123/Worthington
domain.com/456/Worthington/TX193A
(where 123 is the brand number, and 456 is the model number)
You only need extra things (like /questions/ or /index.cfm or /brand.cfm or whatever) if you are unable to disambiguate different pages without them.
Remember: this part of the URL identifies the page - it needs to be possible to identify a single page with a single URL - to put it another way, every page should have a unique URL, and every unique URL should be a different page. (Excluding the query string and page fragment parts.)
Again, using the SO example - there are more than just questions here, there are users and tags and so on too. so they couldn't just do stackoverflow.com/7275745/question-title because it's not clearly distinct from stackoverflow.com/651924/evik-james - which they solve by inserting /questions and /users into each of those to make it obvious what each one is.
Ultimately, the best URL system to use depends on what pages your site has and who the people using your site are - you need to consider these and come up with a suitable solution. Simpler URLs are better, but too much simplicity may cause confusion.
Hopefully this all makes sense?
Here is an answer based on what I know about SEO and what we have implemented:
The first thing that get searched and considered is your domain name, and thus picking something related to your domain name is very important
URL with query string has lower priority than the one that doesn't. The reason is that query string is associated with dynamic content that could change over time. The search engine might also deprioritize those with query string fearing that it might be used for SPAM and diluting the result of SEO itself
As for using the URL such as
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7113295/sql-should-i-use-a-junction-table-or-not
As the search engine looks at both the domain and the path, having the question in the path will help the Search Engine and elevate the question as a more relevant page when someone typing part of the question in the search engine.
I am not an SEO expert, but the company I work for has a dedicated dept to managing the SEO of our site. They much prefer the params to be in the URI, rather than in the query string, and I'm sure they prefer this for a reason (not simply to make the web team's job slightly trickier... all though there could be an element of that ;-)
That said, the bulk of what they concern themselves with is the content within and composition of the page. The domain name and URL are insignificant compared to having good, relevant content in a well defined structure.

How do SO URLs self correct themselves if they are mistyped?

If an extra character (like a period, comma or a bracket or even alphabets) gets accidentally added to URL on the stackoverflow.com domain, a 404 error page is not thrown. Instead, URLs self correct themselves & the user is led to the relevant webpage.
For instance, the extra 4 letters I added to the end of a valid SO URL to demonstrate this would be automatically removed when you access the below URL -
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/194812/list-of-freely-available-programming-booksasdf
I guess this has something to do with ASP.NET MVC Routing. How is this feature implemented?
Well, this is quite simple to explain I guess, even without knowing the code behind it:
The text is just candy for search engines and people reading the URL:
This URL will work as well, with the complete text removed!
The only part really important is the question ID that's also embedded in the "path".
This is because EVERYTHING after http://stackoverflow.com/questions/194812 is ignored. It is just there to make the link, if posted somewhere, if more speaking.
Internally the URL is mapped to a handler, e.g., by a rewrite, that transforms into something like: http://stackoverflow.com/questions.php?id=194812 (just an example, don't know the correct internal URL)
This also makes the URL search engine friendly, besides being more readable to humans.

ASP.NET MVC Url display problem

I have recently been experimenting with the profile features of ASP.NET. I am having trouble getting a "website" property to display correctly. For example, if the website I enter is: facebook.com/contactalig and I render it using
<%: Profile.Website %>
it gets rendered on screen as http://localhost:51225/users/facebook.com/contactalig Initially, I thought I might just prepend "http://" if it didn't contain one, but I feel there should be a cleaner solution.
Thanks in advance.
Without the protocol etc it isn't an absolute uri, so the browser (correctly) treats it as relative to the current URL.
So yes: check for a protocol. Perhaps just StartsWith is enough here, else a regex or maybe Uri.TryCreate (or whatever it is) specifying absolute-only.
Personally I would do this check at the point of data-entry, not at display.

dynamic seo title for news articles

I have a news section where the pages resolve to urls like
newsArticle.php?id=210
What I would like to do is use the title from the database to create seo friendly titles like
newsArticle/joe-goes-to-town
Any ideas how I can achieve this?
Thanks,
R.
I suggest you actually include the ID in the URL, before the title part, and ignore the title itself when routing. So your URL might become
/news/210/joe-goes-to-town
That's exactly what Stack Overflow does, and it works well. It means that the title can change without links breaking.
Obviously the exact details will depend on what platform you're using - you haven't specified - but the basic steps will be:
When generating a link, take the article title and convert it into something URL-friendly; you probably want to remove all punctuation, and you should consider accented characters etc. Bear in mind that the title won't need to be unique, because you've got the ID as well
When handling a request to anything starting with /news, take the next part of the path, parse it as an integer and load the appropriate article.
Assuming you are using PHP and can alter your source code (this is quite mandatory to get the article's title), I'd do the following:
First, you'll need to have a function (or maybe a method in an object-oriented architecture) to generate the URLs for you in your code. You'd supply the function with the article object or the article ID and it returns the friendly URL with the ID and the friendly title.
Basically function url(Article $article) => URL.
You will also need some URL rewriting rules to remove the PHP script from the URL. For Apache, refer to the mod_rewrite documentation for details (RewriteEngine, RewriteRule, RewriteCond).

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