DNN URL Rewriter on Steroids

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DNN URL Rewriter on Steroids

Posted on Wed Jan 16, 2008 by Tom Kraak
In: DotNetNuke, SEO, DNN Tips & Tricks | 8 Comments

While fighting and ultimately losing an uphill battle against a commercial URL rewriting module last week, I came across Bruce Chapman's blog. To make a long story short, Bruce picked up Scott McCulloch's Friendly URL's slack and vastly build on it and improved it.

Back in August 2007, Bruce first tackled an issue commonly seen in more complex DNN modules: an abundance of URL query string parameters (see any permalink on this blog for example.) Next, Bruce implemented the ability to "automatically" 301 redirect DNN legacy URLs so that established DNN-based websites who have already been indexed by Google and company won't be penalized for duplicated content while taking advantage of the more "human friendly" URLs provided by Bruce's rewriter. This feature alone means a big leap forward for the world of DNN SEO.

More recently, Bruce took things even further and added, among other things, functionality such as "freedom of extension" (.aspx, .page, or whatever else makes your heart beat faster) or my favorite: no extension at all (who said we can't have those nice WordPress URLs, eh?) Due to popular demand, Bruce also put effort into replacing spaces in tab names with dashes and forcing all generated URLs to be lower case. Most features are configurable via web.config.

I still very much appreciate Scott McCulloch's pioneering in this area, but with Bruce Chapman, DNN finally has the attention of a talented developer with an SEO mindset, which in my opinion is an essential prerequisite for success when working on the "search engine facing" parts of our beloved web application framework.

Free downloads including source and sample web.config files are located here (scroll way down.) And don't hesitate to ask installation and configuration questions here or over on Bruce's blog.

Comments

Saturday, January 19, 2008 at 5:29 PM Exiton says:

Could you write a comparison table of URL examples for a number of modules?

DNN with both Friendly and Human Friendly URLs enabled on the left and Infinity's URLs on the right.

Saturday, January 19, 2008 at 7:50 PM Tom Kraak says:

You are absolutely correct, I should have thrown in a few examples. See Bruce's blog for now.

Sunday, January 20, 2008 at 1:32 AM Déclic Vidéo FX says:

Hello,
Do you know how it is working with localisation ?
My pages are in french and in english, how does it handle such cases ??

DV FX

Monday, January 21, 2008 at 2:35 PM Tom Kraak says:

Good question DV, but I've not gone there yet. Good that you posted on Bruce's blog ... let's see what he says.

Monday, March 17, 2008 at 2:29 AM Bruce Chapman says:

Tom,
Thanks for your coverage of the Friendly Url Provider. You might be interested to read of the newest venture into the DNN Url territory, the development of a module with even more functionality. I've called it the 'Url Master' - and it does everything the Friendly Url Provider does, plus more, including finally giving the Site Administrator the flexilbility to define their own Urls.

I've made a blog post about it on my site Url Master for DotNetNuke Urls

Monday, March 17, 2008 at 8:19 AM Tom Kraak says:

Bruce - impressive feature list. Thanks for keeping us posted.

Saturday, September 12, 2009 at 8:47 PM pokies says:

My site is built in DNN and I've been wanting to change the URLs. I've used this tool from infinity before and it's great, just a little bit pricey.

Wednesday, January 06, 2010 at 5:50 AM Karen Lymer says:

Hello

We want to remove the /dotnetnuke/ from all 300 pages of our website that has been running since Feb 09.

Google isn't indexing all of our pages just 98. I'm thinking that the /dotnetnuke/ is causing our content to be too deep in our site for Google to find(?)

We also don't have any Page Rank although our site appears on page one for most search queries. Obviously we don't want to lose our position in Google.

Would you advise that we do remove the /dotnetnuke/ in our urls and if so should we create a new site and use 301 redirects or is there a way of removing the /dotnetnuke/ from our existing urls but still keeping our Google history?

Many thanks,

Karen

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