iFinity

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Thursday, June 24, 2010 4:56 PM 

One of the features of early DotNetNuke was the ability to track clicks of particular links within the site.  You could work out how many people clicked on a link on a certain page.

This is one of those features which is actually of limited use these days – a good web analytics package will give you that detail, and a whole lot more.  There wasn’t even a link click report you could look at to see the result – though I have written one of these you can use.

However, the ‘LinkClick’ approach still litters the DotNetNuke framework and can get ordinary people into difficulty with their SEO efforts.

The problems with the LinkClick handler

The LinkClick handler is a generic Url which looks like http://example.com/linkclick.aspx?tabid=234&moduleid=355.  It can be thought of as a generic redirector, like Microsoft used to use for everything a few years back (it was go.microsoft.com or something like that).  There’s several issues with this:

1) it uses a 302 redirect to get you to your content, instead of just a direct link

2) it’s doubtful whether any link value is passed onto the destination page

3) these days with human friendly Urls not containing any ‘tabid’ information, the links are actually quite brittle and easily broken when people move and rename pages.

The LinkClick handler is actually a multi-faceted tool : it is also used to serve up downloadable files (like zip packages and pdf documents) as well as being used to serve up secure files.  To be clear I am discussing the use of the LinkClick handler to redirect users to specific DNN pages, not downloadable files.

The SEO drawbacks for using the linkclick handler are both the lack of contextual keywords in the Url, and the use of a 302 redirect, which is not always followed correctly by search engines, as opposed to a straight hyperlink which search engines know exactly what to do with.

Using the LinkClick Handler without realising

Most people don’t even know they are creating ‘LinkClick’ Urls.  It usually happens when they use the DotNetNuke ‘Link’ control somewhere in a module.  For an example, I’m going to show the announcements module.

An announcement in the announcements module consists of a title, description and link.  The title is a plain-text field (although you can be sneaky and enter your own html).  The link for the announcement appears as the ‘read more…’ hyperlink.

The ‘read more’ link comes from the ‘link’ field in the Announcement, which looks like this:

This is the generic DNN Link control – and it appears in many different locations.  The selection of the ‘Link Type’ option drives what the actual link will look like.

Here’s the list:

• None – no link (obviously!)
• Url – you enter a Url in the full format, ie http://example.com/somewhere.aspx
• Page – you select a page from the current site in the drop down box
• File – you select a file from the current site in the drop down box
• User – you enter the username for a user in your site

If you choose ‘File’ it will create a linkclick based Url – but that’s not what this blog post is about.

If you choose ‘Page’, it will create a normal Url based on your current Friendly Url Settings.  In this example, ‘Blog’ is selected, so the returned Url will be http://example.com/blog.aspx

However, if you then check ‘Track number of times this link is clicked’ then the simple hyperlink will be replaced with a linkclick Url, which will track the tabid the destination is for, and the module Id the link is situated on, giving you a hyperlink which will look like http://example.com/linkclick.aspx?link=aa&tabid=xx&mid=yy.  When you click on this link, the click is recorded, and then the request is 302 redirected to the eventual page.

So my recommendation is this : Do not tick the ‘Track number of times this link is clicked’ unless you have a very clear and valid reason to do so. 

By sticking to this advice, you’ll avoid having ‘LinkClick.aspx’ Urls all through your site content.

Avoid the Link Box and get better contextual Links

While I’m discussing the ‘Announcements’ module, I’ll just add that I don’t recommend using the ‘link’ text at all.

Instead of having a text which reads something like:

‘My very important announcement on the sale of widgets read more…’

I recommend ignoring the ‘link’ field and just baking the link into the Html description, like this:

‘My very important announcement on the sale of widgets’

You can link in the Html either by creating the Html yourself, directly, or by using the FCK Editor/Telerik RadEditor link toolbar button to do it for you.

Link this way does two things:

1. It gives exact control over the link anchor text your link has.  This helps notify search engines of what the relevant keywords for the linked page are.
2. It gives exact control over the format of the link itself, and ensures the format and destination is exactly as you wish.  For example, instead of just linking to a blog page, you can link to a particular blog entry.

This is how the announcements on the home page of this site are handled.

Conclusion

My advice is to avoid the linkclick handler all together.  Further to this, I advise learning on how to create correct html anchor links (the <a href=’’>link text</a> tag) and craft them yourself, so you know exactly where and how you are linking.

Got any more pointers, disagree or agree?  Leave a comment and let me know.

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