First off, apologies for not knowing the nomenclature for what I'm looking for, I'm not typically a Windows web admin.
I have a SharePoint website which contains several subsites. We also have several alternate URLs that point to specific pages, and some of those alternate URLs have friendly URLs which also redirect to other specific pages. We're in the process of migrating from a SharePoint 2007 site to this one, and in the process, I'm trying to remove our reliance on our registrar for handling some of this redirection, because it is apparently not a free service.
Currently our registrar does the following redirects:
http://alias1.tld/* redirects to http://subsite1.ca/page1
http://alias1.tld/friendly redirects to http://subsite1.ca/page2
http://alias2.tld/ redirects to http://subsite1.ca/page3
I know I can accomplish the first and second by setting the sites up in IIS, and using the HTTP Redirect function, but I'm not sure how I can do the second one. In Apache this would be easy, but I'm not sure what I'm looking for here.
Is this something that should be handled within SharePoint, and have that take care of redirecting alias1.tld/friendly to the specific page, or is this something I need to setup in IIS? Is this what URL rewrite is for, or is there a different IIS way to do this?
I'm not sure that this is the best way to do it, but I got things working how I wanted them. Here's what I ended up doing:
Create a new subsite on subsite1 to give me the URL subsite1.ca/subsubsite
Create a redirect from alias1.tld to subsite1.ca/subsite
Create 2 pages for the new subsite. One for the default page and one to use to redirect to page2. Both pages are redirects, Default points to Page1, the second points to Page2.
Set the subsite to use Managed Navigation for global and current through Site Settings > Navigation, and created a default term set by selecting the new subsite in the list and then clicking Create Term Set, then clicking OK.
Then created a term store for the one page that needs to be handled differently by going to Site Settings > Term Store Management. Click on the Term Set created in the last step, then select New Term. On the Term-Driven Pages tab, create the friendly URL and then select the target page, which is the redirect page created in step 3, then click Save.
Related
I've configured my IIS (asp.net site) to use URL Rewrite.
In particular this is my rule (dynamic one): whatever url in format number/string will be redirected to a special aspx page.
SSo whatever url starts with mysite/id/Name is redirected to showprof.aspx?id=id&title=Name. This works perfectly.
My question is about search engines. I don't have any "fixed" page that contains links like mysite/id/Name that the spider can scan, so I'm trying to figure it out how search engines could index my dynamic pages. Should I create a sitemap.xml? if yes in wich way? or should I create a "hidden" page that contains every link to all my dynamic contents like mysite/id1/Name1 mysite/id2/Name2 and so on?
thank you
A starting point is definitely a Sitemap.xml, You could try for example the IIS SEO Toolkit and see if it is able to index any of your pages: http://www.iis.net/downloads/microsoft/search-engine-optimization-toolkit
It also has functionality to generate a sitemap.xml, although I'm guessing in your case you probably have some dynamic content, so a better approach would be to have a "handler" that generates it dynamically on demand (maybe cache it for performance reasons).
I would also recommend to have some pages that actually are accessible through normal links, for example maybe have in your home page of the site a link to a "site map" page (not sitemap.xml), where there you render a set of links that you want to index (at least the ones that are most important to you), and that will make them easy to discover.
A marketer in my company has a landing page on our site: www.importantcompany.com/amazingproduct
They have a vanity url that goes to the landing page:
www.amazingproduct.com
I successfully created the iis redirect rule. However, the marketer has comeback and would like to keep the redirect rule, but keep the address in the bar www.amazingproduct.com instead of www.importantcompany.com/amazingproduct
I'm assuming that this is not possible.
The only way to make this work is to create a new site in iis and copy the landing page into the new site and set the new site to go to www.amazingproduct.com
Please let me know if my assumption is correct.
Thanks!
Your assumption is incorrect.
You could write a filter on IIS that looks at the requested URL and notes if "www.amazingproduct.com" is sent in to do a "Server.Transfer" of the request to the subfolder that would be one solution that wouldn't require a new site at all.
URL Rewrite could also be another way to configure a way around this to some degree.
I've been asked by a family friend to completely overhaul the website for their business. I've designed my own website, so I know some of the basics of web design and development.
To work on their website from my own home, I know I'll need to FTP into their server, and therefore I'll need their FTP credentials, as well as their CMS credentials. I'm meeting with them in a couple of days and I don't want to look like a moron! Is there anything else I need to ask them for during our first meeting (aside from what they want in their new site, etc.) before I start digging into it?
Thanks!
From an SEO point of view, you should be concerned with 301 redirects as (i suppose) some or all URL adressess will change (take a different name, be removed and etc)
So, after you`ve created a new version of the site - and before you put it online - you should go ahead and list all "old site" URLs and decide, preferably for each one, it's new status (unchanged or redirected and if so - to what URL).
Mind that even is the some content will not re-appear on the new site, you still have to redirect the URL (say to HomePage) to keep link juice and SERP rankings.
Also, for a larger sites, (especially dynamic sites) try looking for URL patterns for bulk redirects. For example, if you see that google indexes 1,000 index.php?search=[some-key-word] pages, you don`t need to redirect each one individually as these are probably just search result pages that can be grouped with REGEX to be redirected to main search result page.
To index "old site" URLs you should:
a. site:domainname.com in Google (then set the SERP to 100 results and scaped manually of with Xpath)
b. Xenu or other site crawler (some like screamingfrog) to get a list of all URLs.
c. combine the lists in excel and remove all duplicates.
If you need help with 301 redirects you can start with this link:
http://www.webconfs.com/how-to-redirect-a-webpage.php/
If the website is static, knowing html, css and javascript along with FTP credentials is enough for you to get started. However if the site is dynamic interactive and database driven, you may need to ask if they want to use a php, In that case you might end up building this site in wordpress.
If you are going to design the website from scratch then also keep this point in mind.. Your friend might have hosted this website at somewhere (i.e. hosting provider). You should get its hosting control panel details as well which will help to manage the website (including database, email, FTP, etc.).
This is not SEO related in any way please do not post any thing about SEO ranking as it is not a factor here.
I have 2 urls
old.websitename.com and new.websitename.com
I need to support both urls for a certain length of time and rather than creating 2 sites in IIS I wanted to see if there was a way of doing this by hosting just a single site.
I can not do any redirects on the urls and both urls will need to be active eg I can not have a user go to old.websitename.com and be redirected new.websitename.com. if they go to old.websitename.com they need to stay on that url and not be redirected in any way.
Can this be done on IIS 7 (note this is IIS not Apache or PHP based)
You just need to create a binding for each hostname.
Right click the site. "Edit Bindings"
Click Add
Enter the hostname
Repeat 1-3 for each hostname.
Is it possible to set a default site for a group of users in Sharepoint and have the main default page redirect them to the sub site?
I don't know an out of the box feature which could do this, but you could write a small WebPart which does the redirect depending on the user who visits the site. Shouldn't be to difficult.
The configuration could either be stored in the web part itself or within a list. To speedup the whole redirect process you should cache the redirect information when it was read from the configuration.
That's the way I would do this.
Don't forget to think about a way which let you access and edit the page with the redirect web part without getting redirected.