DNN URL Rewriter on Steroids
Posted by Tom on Wednesday, January 16, 2008 to DotNetNuke, SEO, DNN Tips and Tricks
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.
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