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Friendly URLs in XperienCentral
When XperienCentral's SEO component is installed, theoretically all URLs for your website are friendly. The friendly URL for pages is constructed using the page's location in the navigation tree together with the URL title, navigation title, or page title (depending on how SEO is configured). For example, if a page has the title "XperienCentral", then the URL of the page will be .../xperiencentral.htm (or .html). With SEO disabled, the URL of a page is not created using the pages's friendly URL title, instead an internal ID as assigned to pages within XperienCentral is used, for example .../id=77581/langid=42. For search engines and users, the unfriendly URL provides no useful meaning regarding the contents of the page and/or its location in the website's navigation hierarchy.
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The friendly URL of an item in XperienCentral includes the relative path to the item based on the structure of the navigation tree, the title of the item and an extension, in much the same way that a path for a file is delineated in a file system. The precise URL that an item will be assigned is derived using a set of rules that evaluate the item's title(s) as well as its location in the website's navigation hierarchy. In XperienCentral, you can assign the following three titles to pages/content items:
| Title | Description |
|---|---|
| URL Title | The title to use in the friendly URL for the item. |
| Navigation Title | The title that will be used for the page in your website's navigation tree. Navigation titles only apply to pages. |
| Page/Content item title | The title of the item itself that appears when the page or content item displays in the browser. |
When determining which of the three titles to use in the friendly URL, the following title sequence is stepped through by XperienCentral:
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- The URL's extension is set to .htm.
- The separator symbol, which is substituted for spaces that appear in titles, is a dash (-). The separator symbol is defined in the General tab of the XperienCentral Setup Tool. The default is a dash (-).
| Title | Navigation Title | URL Title | Friendly URL |
|---|---|---|---|
| Welcome to GX | Welcome |
| /welcome.htm | |
| News |
| welcome/news.htm | |||
| Articles |
| welcome/news/article.htm | ||
| News Archive |
| welcome/news/news-archive.htm | |||
| Products overview |
| Products | welcome/products.htm | ||
| XperienCentral |
| welcome/products/xperiencentral.htm |
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For Content Repository items, the situation is a bit different. Because Content Repository items do not have navigation titles, only the URL title or the title of the item itself is used in the friendly URL. If a content item has a URL title, it is used in the friendly URL, otherwise the title of the content item itself is used. The exact friendly URL that a content item will have when it is viewed depends on the page on which it is displayed.
For example, if a content item has the title "GX releases XperienCentral 10", the friendly URL of the content item is 'GX-releases-XperienCentral-10.htm'. There is no hierarchical structure prefixed internally to the friendly URL of the content item because it is stored in the Content Repository. When the content item is displayed on a page, the hierarchical structure of the 'display on' page is prefixed to the content item's friendly URL with the result being the friendly URL for the page and the content item. Based on the example friendly URLs shown in the table above, the friendly URLs for the following sample content items would be:
| Content Item Title | Display on Page | Friendly URL |
|---|---|---|
| XperienCentral 10 | Products | welcome/products/xperiencentral-10.htm |
| Engagement | Articles | welcome/news/articles/engagement.htm |
| Version 10 | XperienCentral | welcome/products/xperiencentral/version-10.htm |
Google News ID for Articles
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XperienCentral does not distinguish between uppercase and lowercase letters when resolving URLs. That is, the URLs http://www.gxsoftware.com/Welcome.htm and http://www.gxsoftware.com/welcome.htm resolve to the same address. While friendly URLs in XperienCentral can be a mixture of uppercase and lowercase letters as displayed in the address bar of a browser, all versions of an address using a mixture of cases are the same.
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In addition to the friendly URL, a content item can also be navigated to from a second friendly URL that omits the friendly URL separator. For example, if the friendly URL separator is a dash (-) and the friendly URL for a page is gx-products.htm
then the above page is also available at the friendly URL gxproducts.htm
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Page Title Uniqueness
In XperienCentral it is not required that all web pages have a unique title. Because the friendly URL is determined based on the title of a page plus its location in the navigation structure, two or more pages can have the same title and not have friendly URL conflicts. For example:
| Parent Page Title(s) | Page Title | Friendly URL |
|---|---|---|
| GX/Support | Contact | gx/support/contact.htm |
| GX/Sales | Contact | gx/sales/contact.htm |
| GX Public | Contact | gx-public/contact.htm |
In the example above, the "Contact" pages all have the page title "Contact" but because of their relative locations in the site structure, the friendly URLs for the pages remain unique. Given the fact that the friendly URL is determined by a page's title (URL, navigation, page), the following situation in which three pages in the same tree have the same page title also does not lead to friendly URL conflicts:
| Parent Page Title(s) | URL Title | Navigation Title | Page Title | Friendly URL |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| GX/Sales | Contacting |
| Contact | gx/sales/contacting.htm | ||
| GX/Sales |
| Contact us | Contact | gx/sales/contact-us.htm | ||
| GX/Sales |
| Contact | gx/sales/contact.htm |
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Content Item Title Uniqueness
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- All titles used in the friendly URL of all other content items in the Content Repository (URL title/ content item title)
- All titles that are currently used in the friendly URL of a page (URL title, navigation title, page title)
- All titles that are currently used in the friendly URL of all pages in all web initiatives channels where the content item can appear
- All friendly URLs assigned to external (database) objects
This is because content items can be displayed on any page and therefore XperienCentral has no way of determining at the time that a content item is created where it will be displayed and therefore what its full friendly URL will be. XperienCentral only compares the friendly URL of newly created content items to last part of all existing friendly URLs '.htm'. For example, creating a content item that resolves to the friendly URL 'Contact.htm' would lead to a friendly URL conflict with all the pages in the following table:
| Parent Page Titles | URL Title | Navigation Title | Page Title | Friendly URL |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| GX/Public | Contact |
| Contacting us | gx/public/contact.htm | ||
| GX/Sales |
| Contact | Contact GX | gx/sales/contact.htm | ||
| GX/Support |
| Contact | gx/support/contact.htm |
In XperienCentral, when two pages/items attempt to resolve to the same friendly URL, the conflict is resolved automatically. The mechanism for resolving friendly URLs is fully described in How Friendly URLs are Constructed.
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XperienCentral determines which item claims a friendly URL in a straightforward manner: The item that was created first claims the friendly URL it wants — All other items that try to claim that friendly URL are assigned a different, unique URL based on the name of the original. For items that attempt to use a claimed URL, a dash (-) plus a number is appended to the end of the original friendly URL and that is used in the address for the item. The number increments by one for each successive item that wants to claim the original friendly URL in the order they are created. The following simple example assumes that the pages are assigned no URL or navigation title but share the same page title in the same tree structure:
| Order Created | Page Title | Friendly URL |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Contact | contact.htm |
| 2 | Contact | contact-1.htm |
| 3 | Contact | contact-2.htm |
| 4 | Contact | contact-3.htm |
As you can see above, if you create a page named "Contact" and then later another with the same name in the same tree structure, the second page will be assigned the friendly URL "Contact-1.htm", the third "Contact-2.htm", and so forth.
The example above shows how page titles that attempt to claim the same URL are resolved. It is also possible to have URL conflicts that are the result of more complicated circumstances, such as URL titles and/or navigation titles that conflict with a page or object title or navigation titles that conflict with each other, content item titles that conflict with a page's friendly URL, and so forth. The following table shows what the URL result would be for conflicts at a variety of title and navigation title levels.
| Order Created | URL Title | Navigation Title | Page Title | Friendly URL |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Contact |
| Contact | contact.htm | |
| 2 |
| Contact |
| contact-1.htm | ||
| 3 |
| Contact us | Contact | contact-us.htm | |
| 4 |
| Contact | contact-2.htm | |||
| 5 | Contact |
| Contacting GX | contact-3.htm |
Friendly URL Conflict Indicator
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- Accept the friendly URL as assigned by XperienCentral.
- Rename the title (URL, navigation, page) of the current page/content item that is attempting to use the claimed friendly URL to a desired, unclaimed friendly URL.
- If the title of the page or content item itself conflicts with a claimed friendly URL but you nevertheless want to continue using it, add an unused navigation or URL title that does not produce a friendly URL conflict. For page title conflicts, you can also make use of an alternate URL path to avoid the conflict. Alternate URL paths are described in detail in Using Alternate URL Paths.
- Release the URL from the page/content item that is claiming it so that it can be used by the current page/content item. See Releasing Claimed Friendly URLs for complete information.
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Maintaining Friendly URLs
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In the overview, the column headings have the following meanings:
| Heading | Description |
|---|---|
| id | An internal identifier for the friendly URL within XperienCentral. IDs are assigned in the order that friendly URLs are created, beginning with 1 and incrementing by 1 for each new friendly URL. |
| URL title | The title of the friendly URL as derived from the URL title, navigation title, or page/content item title. |
| Normalized URL title | The friendly URL title after it has been normalized. Normalizing URL titles is necessary in order to ensure that they are valid for browsers. The normalizing of friendly URL titles is described in detail in the section URL Title Standardization. Note: The normalized URL title as it appears in the exported list does not preserve case usage and does not contain the separator symbol that is substituted for spaces in the friendly URL |
| Querystring | An internal string that XperienCentral uses to retrieve pages, content items, and external database objects. The query string syntax for each item type within XperienCentral has a unique form, for example:
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| Current URL Title | Specifies the identifier (from column 1) that is the current friendly URL for this item. If an item contains an entry in this column, it means that it is no longer an active URL: When this friendly URL is navigated to, the visitor will be redirected to the friendly URL referenced by the id in 'Current URL title' instead.See Maintaining Items with More Than One Friendly URL for more information. |
| WebsiteID | An internal identifier that refers to the |
| channel that the page belongs to. Content Repository items are assigned the value "-1" because they can appear in any |
| channel in the configuration and therefore do not belong to a specific one. |
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- Navigate to Configuration > SEO.
- On the [Overview] tab, select "All pages without friendly URLs". The items without a friendly URL are listed. If any items appear in the list, you can manually recalculate the friendly URL for some or all items on your website.
- Click the [Friendly URLs] tab.
- Select the type of recalculation to be performed:
- Calculate the friendly URL for all items which have no friendly URL yet. A friendly URL will be assigned only to the selected items currently lacking a friendly URL.
- Recalculate the friendly URL for all items. A friendly URL will be calculated for all the selected items belonging to the current web initiativechannel. The URL history for pages and content items will be preserved.
- Select the items for which the friendly URL calculation will be performed: "Pages" or "Content Repository items".
- Click
[Calculate]. Items with no friendly URL will be assigned one.