iFinity

Chris Hammond today posted the latest show of DNNVoice, a DotNetNuke podcast.  This show (Show #7) features an interview with yours truly.  In this interview with Tom Kraak of seablick.com, I cover a few topics which would be familiar to readers of my blog.  Principally, I discuss DotNetNuke, SEO and Urls and where I think the improvements can be made.  You can download the full podcast at http://www.dnnvoice.com/Home/itemId/23177/DNNVoice-Show-7-Discussion-on-SEO-and-URLs-with-B.aspx

It's no secret that, for a long time, I've had this site running with no page extensions - instead of having all of the pages ending with .aspx, I converted it a long time ago to /.   It's been pointed out to me several times by several people that the '/'  should actually denote part of a path, instead of the actual resource.  Deep down I agreed with this but it was harder to code : therefore confirming my long-held assertion that most programmers are actually lazy.

However, I'm happy to report that the laziness and inertia was overcome and I've refactored the Url Master code so that, when 'no page extension' is selected as an option, the paths will look like this : domain/path/path/page rather than domain/path/path/page/.  Not only that, but I've also included a 301 redirect for the '/' suffixed paths back to the plain old path.

You can see the results just by looking at the url of this very blog entry.

How you can switch off page extensions Like what you see?  Well, you can have it as well. ...

It's not that often that something truly new comes along in the world of Search Engines, especially something that the Search Engine companies themselves promote.   Whenever it happens, there's always a flurry of activity and a lot of false information being thrown about.

Something new just came along at the SMX conference, the 'Canonical Link Element'.  You've probably already read about this, but if you haven't, it's a tag you can add to the header of your webpages to tell the Search Engines what the 'Canonical' (also Normalized) Url is.  Canonical or Normalized Urls are the 'one true Url' for that page.

Background on Canonical Urls and Duplicate Content Canonical Urls are the opposite of duplicate content.  Duplicate content is the result of having one distinct page of content returned for different urls.  In DotNetNuke, consider all these Urls for a mythical 'domain.com' dnn site:

www.domain.com/

domain.com/

domain.com/default.aspx

...